The Press Still Can’t Grasp Anti-Discrimination Law

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 05, 2025

 

At CNN, John Fritze explains one of today’s Supreme Court decisions, Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services:

 

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a straight woman in Ohio who filed a “reverse discrimination” lawsuit against her employer when her gay boss declined to promote her. The ruling will make it easier to file such suits in some parts of the country.

 

Despite the politically divisive debate playing out over workplace diversity efforts – a fight that has been fueled by President Donald Trump – a unanimous coalition of conservative and liberal justices were in the majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the opinion for the court.

 

Good grief. Where to start?

 

Like CNN, The Hill, USA Today, and the Associated Press also went with a headline that referenced “reverse discrimination.” But, of course, there is no such thing — which was literally the point of the Supreme Court’s ruling. As the majority opinion confirmed:

 

As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. Rather, the provision makes it unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, condotions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

 

Got that? The law prohibits discrimination. It does not prohibit discrimination in a particular direction, or between particular groups, or in a particular manner. It prohibits discrimination per se — which attaches at the level of the individual, irrespective of which immutable characteristics that individual exhibits. The term “reverse discrimination” does not appear anywhere in the Court’s opinion. Why? Because that term has no foundation in the law.

 

And yet, even in pieces whose sole purpose is to cover the repudiation, the press keeps using it. This is not laziness; it’s zealotry. Almost to a man, the mainstream media is staffed by ideological extremists who cannot — or will not — understand that our civil rights laws were explicitly designed to be colorblind. In their conception, only members of the majority can be racist or bigoted or discriminatory, and, as a result, any attempt to enforce the rules in favor of an individual who belongs to that majority must mean that the logic of the law has been “reversed.”

 

It is for this reason that we see the attendant claim that this case reflected a “politically divisive debate.” They consider it “divisive” or “controversial,” so they assume everyone else does. But today’s decision was unanimous. And the words I quoted above were written by Justice Jackson — arguably the most progressive member of the Court.

 

Will her ruling prompt protest? Don’t count on it. The idea that discrimination is good if it’s aimed at the right people is, in fact, wildly unpopular. The affirmative action decision from a couple of years ago enjoyed the support of nearly 80 percent of Americans; DEI is almost universally loathed by normal people; and “wokeness” — which has now become a euphemism for monomaniacal race-essentialism — is as politically toxic as it’s ever been. Certainly, there remains some enthusiasm for “positive discrimination” within our elite institutions. But that does not make those ideas “controversial” so much as confirm that the places in which they thrive are out of touch. One day, perhaps, CNN will comprehend that “don’t discriminate” is understood by a supermajority of Americans to mean “don’t discriminate,” and that they are absolutely happy with that definition. But, alas, today will not be that day.