President Donald Trump signed nearly three dozen executive orders during his first week in office. One order he signed on Tuesday repealed a variety of federal diversity requirements, including a 1965 executive order that forbade discrimination in hiring practices by government contractors, issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Some social media users appear to have mistakenly conflated Trump’s executive order with a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and falsely claimed that the move to repeal Johnson’s 1965 executive order will leave businesses free to discriminate in their employment practices.
A popular news aggregator account on X, “NewsWire,” tweeted Wednesday, “President Trump has repealed Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning hiring discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Imani Barbarin, a disability rights activist and TikTok influencer, tweeted in response to the “NewsWire” post: “And not a single person on the ‘left’ bothered to have this codified into law for 60 YEARS???”
Comedian Marvin Hunter and rapper Mysonne Linen shared similar videos on Instagram. “This act literally outlawed discrimination in hiring when it comes to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” Linen claimed.
These claims are mostly false, ignoring that other laws protect people from employment discrimination. While this executive order did bar federal contractors from discriminating “against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin,” such discriminatory practices are also made illegal through Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The federal law states, “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer … to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order extending the nondiscrimination clause in Johnson’s 1965 executive order to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. Such language is not present in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but recent Supreme Court precedent protects both categories from discrimination. In Bostock v. Clayton County, decided in a 6-3 majority opinion in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that both sexual orientation and gender identity were protected under Title VII because that would be a form of sex-based discrimination, which was protected by the federal law’s text. “In both cases the employer fires an individual in part because of sex,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “Instead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles it.”
Because of Title VII, Trump’s executive order doesn’t bring about sweeping change to current anti-discrimination laws. “We have all of these anti-discrimination laws in place, and the president can’t change those,” Dispatch Senior Editor Sarah Isgur said in a recent Advisory Opinions podcast episode. “So, I’m not sure what effect this EO [executive order] will actually have because of all of those, both anti-discrimination laws passed by Congress and court cases we’ve had since then, [define] the parameters of all of those.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act cannot be undone by executive action, and would require the support of majorities in both chambers of Congress to be repealed. What’s more, the current administration would appear to be opposed to repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” Trump’s executive order stated. “These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans.”
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