WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost positions to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.

The decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education and amid the Trump administration’s fierce efforts to root out programs that promote diversity. The ruling will place further pressure on employers and others to eliminate affirmative action and other initiatives that seek to provide opportunities to members of historically disadvantaged groups.

Nearly half of the federal appeals courts had required white people, men and other members of majority groups to meet a more demanding standard when they sued for workplace discrimination. In eliminating that requirement, the court said that a federal civil rights law demanded equal treatment of all individuals.

The standard for proving workplace discrimination under the law, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court, “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”

The case was brought by Marlean A. Ames, who had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which oversees parts of the state’s juvenile corrections system. After a decade there, in 2014 she became the administrator of a program addressing prison rape. Five years later, she applied for a promotion.

Her supervisors turned her down, saying she lacked vision and leadership skills. They eventually gave the position to a gay woman who had been at the department for a shorter time and, unlike Ames, lacked a college degree.

Not long after denying her the new position, her supervisors removed her from her existing job, telling her that they had concerns about her leadership and offering her a demotion that came with a substantial pay cut. She was replaced by a gay man with less seniority.

Ames sued under a federal civil rights law that forbids employment discrimination based on, among other characteristics, sex. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination for purposes of the civil rights law.)

The text of the law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, does not draw distinctions based on whether the person claiming discrimination is a member of a majority group. But some courts have required plaintiffs from majority groups to prove an additional element if they lack direct evidence of discrimination: “background circumstances that support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

Lower courts ruled against Ames on those grounds. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Cincinnati, said she could have satisfied the “background circumstances” requirement by showing that decisions about her employment were made by “a member of the relevant minority group (here, gay people)” or with statistical evidence. But the appeals court said Ames had provided neither kind of proof.

Jackson wrote that the text of the civil rights law “draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.”

Indeed, she wrote, “by establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ — without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group — Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

Conservative legal groups had championed Ames’ case. The Biden administration also supported her argument, filing a brief supporting Ames.

Mexico’s suit against U.S. gunmakers denied

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a lawsuit by the Mexican government against U.S. gun manufacturers that attempted to hold them responsible for drug cartel violence.

In a unanimous decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court held that U.S. legislation that shields gunmakers from liability in certain cases barred the lawsuit. Mexico, she wrote, had not plausibly argued that American gun manufacturers had aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales to Mexican drug traffickers.

Mexico had claimed that the gun industry’s production and sale of arms in the United States helped fuel and supply drug cartels, harming the Mexican government. Mexican government lawyers also claimed the companies were aware that some of their guns were illegally trafficked, and that the country should therefore be allowed to sue under an exception in the law.

In her opinion, Kagan noted that although Mexico has only one gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year, the country “has a severe gun violence problem, which its government views as coming from north of the border.”

During an oral argument in early March, a majority of the justices appeared skeptical that Mexico could prove a direct link between gunmakers and cartel violence. Several justices appeared convinced that a 2005 law shielding gunmakers and distributors from most domestic lawsuits over injuries caused by firearms would also apply to the case brought by the Mexican government.

The case began in 2021 when Mexico filed a lawsuit against a number of American gunmakers and one distributor, arguing that they shared blame for drug cartel violence. The country asked them for $10 billion in damages.

Wis. Catholic charity allowed tax exemption

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that a Catholic charity in Wisconsin was entitled to a tax exemption that had been denied by a state court on the ground that its activities were not primarily religious.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court had ruled that the group’s activities were “primarily charitable and secular” and that it did not “attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith.” Indeed, the state court said, the group employed and served people of all religions.

That meant, the state court found, that the group should be denied the tax exemption even as it accepted the charity’s contention that its services were “based on Gospel values and the principles of the Catholic social teachings.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court, said the state court had engaged in forbidden “denominational discrimination.”

Catholic doctrine as understood by the charity, she wrote, forbids using charitable work to proselytize and requires service to be open to all. The state court, she wrote, had run afoul of the Constitution by imposing “a denominational preference by differentiating between religions based on theological choices.”