News

Meet the Jewish woman who helped land a major LGBTQ victory

The ACLU won a major victory for gay rights: the Supreme Court ruled that federal anti-discrimination laws protect LGBTQ people. Image by Courtesy ACLU

By Helen Chernikoff June 16, 2020

A Jewish lawyer who said her upbringing played a big role in her public-interest career was on the team that scored a big victory for gay rights on Monday when the Supreme Court ruled that federal laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace also protect gay and transgender employees.

“This case, and I feel like a lot of our work, serves the purpose of tikkun olam,” or repairing the world, said Leslie Cooper, 52, who works at the ACLU, which represented the three plaintiffs. “We still have a long way to go to heal the world in terms of how LGBT people have been treated and continue to be treated.”

The ACLU represented three plaintiffs in the case — Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia — two of whom were fired for being gay, and one for being transgender. It was hailed by activists and analysts as something of a surprise, because two of the court’s conservatives, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined its liberals in the 6-3 vote, and Gorsuch even wrote the opinion.

Leslie Cooper Image by Courtesy ACLU

“We are thrilled and relieved by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark legal victory for LGBTQ workers,” said Idit Klein, CEO of Keshet, the Jewish advocacy organization.

Cooper said Gorsuch asked some questions that suggested that he might agree with their argument. They claimed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s prohibition against discrimination “on the basis of sex” includes sexual and gender orientation because those things are only questioned in combination with a person’s sex.

Gorsuch’s example was an employer who had two employees, one male and one female, who were both attracted to men, but fired only the man.

Normally, when such decisions come down, the lawyers wait together, crouched over computers and phones, refreshing their screens again and again. The coronavirus pandemic has changed all that.

“We were huddled virtually this time,” Cooper said.

Cooper is married, with two children, ages eight and six. Her family lives in Jersey City, N.J., and they belong to Temple Beth El, a Reform synagogue that helped lead communal conversations after a fatal, anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher grocery store there.

She’s also working on a case on behalf of the city of Philadelphia in which a publicly-funded foster care agency is suing the city for the right to use religious criteria to select parents.

The ADL and other religious organizations have filed briefs that support the ACLU’s position —religious screening criteria should not be allowed in a government program, Cooper said.

But for now, she and her colleagues are basking in their victory.

“This was a major step of moving toward this vision of a world that’s whole,” she said.

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO