{"id":41599,"date":"2025-11-06T23:51:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T23:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/41599\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T23:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T23:51:07","slug":"ca-supreme-court-upholds-law-on-lgbt-rights-in-nursing-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/41599\/","title":{"rendered":"CA Supreme Court upholds law on LGBT rights in nursing homes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nigel Duara<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

The California Supreme Court<\/a> rejected a First Amendment challenge to a state law that protects the rights of gay and transgender people in nursing homes and forbids employees of those sites from using the wrong pronouns to address a resident or coworker.<\/p>\n

The ruling, handed down today, held that violations of the LGBT Long-Term Care Residents\u2019 Bill of Rights<\/a> are not protected by the First Amendment because they relate to codes of conduct in what is effectively both a workplace and people\u2019s homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pronouns provision constitutes a regulation of discriminatory conduct that incidentally affects speech,\u201d the court ruled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The opinion reversed an appeals court ruling that held provisions in the law relating to patient pronouns and names could impede on an employee\u2019s freedom of speech. Five justices signed onto the main opinion<\/a>; two signed onto a concurrence. There were no dissents.<\/p>\n

The group challenging the 2017 law, Taking Offense, asserted in its lawsuit that the law mandating that long-term care facilities use people\u2019s chosen pronouns amounts to \u201ccriminalizing and compelling speech content.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking Offense described itself in court documents as a group opposing efforts \u201cto coerce society to accept transgender fiction that a person can be whatever sex\/gender s\/he thinks s\/he is, or chooses to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The court ruled that the LGBT Long-Term Care Residents\u2019 Bill of Rights \u201cwill be violated when willful and repeated misgendering has occurred in the presence of a resident, the resident hears or sees the misgendering, and the resident is harmed because the resident perceives that conduct to be abusive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The LGBT Long-Term Care Residents\u2019 Bill of Rights is enforced by a section of California\u2019s Health and Safety Code. Penalties can range from civil fines to criminal misdemeanor prosecutions \u2014 the potential for criminal penalties was a major element of Taking Offense\u2019s argument. The court\u2019s decision noted that other protections for long-term care facility residents have long carried both civil and criminal penalties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems apparent that the Legislature does not intend for such criminal penalties to be imposed except as a last resort, in the most egregious circumstances,\u201d wrote the decision\u2019s author, California Supreme Court Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The opinion made comparisons to other free speech decisions with similar elements, such as the 1995 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that the the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston could not force St. Patrick\u2019s Day parade organizers to include them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBy contrast, the present case does not involve any analogous creative product or expressive association,\u201d Guerrero wrote, concluding that the California law is instead regulating people\u2019s conduct.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Nigel Duara, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. The California…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[381,7,9,8,2081,1280,2434,28073],"class_list":["post-41599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-aging","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-california-supreme-court","tag-health-care","tag-lgbtq","tag-nursing-homes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}