The Supreme Court & LGBTQ Issues: What Catholics Need to Know in 2020

A Presentation and Discussion with Professor Leslie Griffin

This event took place on November 1, 2020. A recording of the presentation is available at the bottom of this page.

In June of 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Bostock decision protected LGBTQ workers from employment discrimination.  Yet, three weeks later, the decision in the O.L. Guadalupe case allowed religious employers wide latitude to discriminate in decisions of hiring and firing.  The Court will be hearing a religious liberty case about LGBTQ people and adoption, Fulton v. Philadelphia, on November 4, 2020.

So where do these three cases leave LGBTQ church workers employed in Catholic institutions, so many of whom have been fired over the last decade, and continue to be dismissed?

On Sunday, November 1, 2020, Professor Leslie Griffin, the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Law, offered a presentation and led a discussion on these topics. Professor Griffin, who also has a doctorate in Religious Studies and was on the faculty of the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is a leading expert on the intersection of religion and law. She has filed several amicus curiae briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court on religious liberty cases.

Speaker: Professor Leslie Griffin

Leslie Griffin

Dr. Leslie C. Griffin is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law. Professor Griffin teaches constitutional law and is known for her interdisciplinary work in law and religion. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame in Theology, and taught in Notre Dame’s Theology Department from 1984-1989.  With Rev. Charles Curran, she is co-editor of The Catholic Church, Morality, and Politics (Paulist Press 2001)   She is the author of the Foundation Press casebook, Law and Religion: Cases and Materials, and is editor of Law and Religion: Cases in Context, and author of numerous articles and book chapters about law, religion, politics and ethics, with titles such as “A Word of Warning from a Woman: Arbitrary, Categorical, and Hidden Religious Exemptions Threaten LGBT Rights,” “Good Catholics Should Be Rawlsian Liberals,” “The Sins of Hosanna-Tabor,” “Hobby Lobby: The Crafty Case That Threatens Women’s Rights and Religious Freedom.” She also blogs for the “Verdict” column at Justitia.com, a leading legal website.  In 2017, she was a plenary speaker at New Ways Ministry’s Eighth National Symposium, “LGBTQ Catholics in the Age of Pope Francis.”