Recently, a monumental Supreme Court decision clarified that employees cannot be fired or discriminated against due to their LGBTQ status. Justin Hill and Lawrence Morales, both of San Antonio, have handled many cases involving employees that have suffered discrimination.Transcript:Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed; however, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.[music]Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. On Monday, June 15th, 2020, the US Supreme Court came out with an opinion Bostock versus Clayton County monumental decision. I'm here with Lawrence Morales, who's one of the best, and in my opinion, the best employment lawyer in town for plaintiffs, or probably a business too, but they're not normally the people I represent. For people that have been wronged on the job and need some answers, Lawrence is the guy to go to. He's the guy I personally go to. I asked him to be on the show today to talk about the Bostock versus Clayton County opinion. Him and I are going to do some cases and represent some people who are going to fall under these new protections. Lawrence, what happened?Lawrence Morales: On Monday, there was a landmark decision that basically extends protection under one of our discrimination laws to about one and a half million more Texans than previously existed. Let me back up and tell you a little bit about the origins of this law. The law is the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is the law that basically bars discrimination and has barred discrimination against race, national origin, sex, color, for the last 40 years. A big question has been whether people who are transgender, sexual orientation, and gender identity are protected classes under that law.By way of background, we'll get a lot of calls sometimes and people will say, "I got fired because I'm a homosexual. Can I bring a claim?" Unfortunately, until Monday, the answer to that question was, "It depends on where you live." There were 29 states in the United States that basically did not have any state law protection for gender identity or sexual orientation, and Texas was one of them.We had to say, "Sorry, go to the EEOC, file a charge of discrimination. This is an issue that's going up to the Supreme Court, and hopefully, it'll be decided in your favor." Thankfully, on Monday, that day finally came, and now it is safe to say that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes under Title VII.Justin: I love the fact that you pointed out 1.5 million Texans are going to fall under this new law or this new decision, which means 1.5 million Texans have additional protections on the job by a law that was passed by a Texan and LBJ.Lawrence: That's right. It was signed into law by LBJ. That's exactly right. The good way to describe it was after the 2015 same-sex opinion, you could get married on Monday morning to somebody of your same sex, but then you can get fired that afternoon because you got married to somebody in your same sex. On Monday that changed. Do you want me to tell you the story about how ironically we have a segregationist to thank for the law that came or the decision that came out on Monday?Justin: Yes.Lawrence: Okay. The story is about a guy named Howard Smith--Justin: I don't get a lot of questions, so I appreciated that question.Lawrence: I'm trying to help. Howard was a United States Congressman from Virginia for about 30 years between the 1930s and the 1960s. Among other things, he

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