In “Supreme Court goofs on same-sex harassment decision,” Op-Ed, March 9), Douglas W. Kmiec misleads his readers about a key holding in the Oncale case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He writes that the decision, which allows a man to sue his employer for sex harassment by male coworkers, “fell well outside the particular statutory language” of Title VII, the federal civil rights statute that bans sex discrimination.
But as noted in the unanimous opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, who is nothing if not scrupulously attentive to statutory language, “nothing in Title VII necessarily bars a claim of discrimination `because of . . . sex’ merely because the plaintiff and the (harasser) . . . are of the same sex.” So ironically, Kmiec commits the very sin that he attributes (quite incorrectly) to Justice Scalia: attempting to rewrite a clear congressional statute to match his personal world view.
If Mr. Kmiec wants men to be able to harass male coworkers with impunity, he is free to petition Congress to pass a new law, but I doubt he’ll find anyone else to carry that particular banner.
