Marlean Ames was distraught in 2019 when she was bumped from an administrator position at the state agency overseeing youth corrections and replaced by a gay man who she says was less qualified.
Ames was demoted, and her pay was cut more than $40,000. A few months later, she lost a management job she had applied for to a woman who had not sought the position initially, according to a lawsuit Ames would soon file. That woman, too, was gay.
Ames’s job discrimination lawsuit makes an unusual claim that could upend how many of the nation’s courts have handled such cases for decades: The department, she says, was biased against straight people like her.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Ames’s bid to revive her case, which was stymied in the lower courts because of past rulings that set a higher legal bar for men, straight people and Whites to prove bias in the workplace than for groups that have historically faced discrimination. That higher standard is unconstitutional, her suit says.
The case is being closely watched by corporations and employment lawyers, many of whom expect the high court’s conservative supermajority to side with Ames, now 60, and make it easier for members of majority groups to sue.
“If she wins, the flood of reverse discrimination claims will be like nothing we’ve ever seen,” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., chief executive of the human resources association SHRM. “Straight, White people everywhere could be filing.”
Imagine that.
