By Ben Johnson

In a 9-0 decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, justices ruled that employers cannot discriminate against a heterosexual woman and unelected judges cannot insert intersectionality into the law. A unanimous Supreme Court opinion rarely brings good news, but justices recently issued a ruling that set back judicial activism, stopped the Left’s tactic of promoting the social revolution at your expense, and exposed the inner workings of the white-collar rainbow revolution.

The plaintiff, Marlean Ames, dedicated her life to eliminating the prison rape of minors. In 2004, she started working for the Ohio Department of Youth — which oversees the state’s incarcerated juvenile population — and in 2014, Ames got promoted to become administrator of PREA: the Prison Rape Elimination Act. “In 2017, Ames was assigned a new supervisor, Ginine Trim, who is gay,” noted the Sixth Circuit’s opinion. Trim’s December 2018 performance evaluation shows Ames met competencies in 10 categories and exceeded in one. But somehow, just four months later, qualified-to-overqualified no longer sufficed.

In April 2019, Ames applied to become Bureau Chief of Quality. After the interview, “Trim congratulated Ames on 30 years of public service, but also suggested that Ames retire,” noted the Sixth Circuit. Activists aim to remake their departments through attrition: Let the old lions emit a final, toothless roar into the sunset while replacing them with young social justice warriors who will bend the arc of history toward radicalism. The department hired “Alexander Stojsavljevic, a 25-year-old gay man, for the position of PREA Administrator. … Later, in December 2019, the Department chose Yolanda Frierson, a gay woman, as its Bureau Chief of Quality.” Frierson had not originally applied for the position and did not have a college degree; Stojsavljevic had only been on the job a few years.

They gave Ames the option of taking her old job as executive secretary, cutting her salary from $47.22 an hour to $28.40. Ames accepted the job. She sued but lost at the district and appellate level. The appeals court admitted, “Ames is right that the Department has offered different reasons for her demotion at different times,” settling on the story that “her position was at-will and that it could remove her at any time without cause.”

Although the facts seem squarely on Ames’s side, the court sided against her, because she did not fulfill the “background circumstances” rule: a legal standard the court invented stating that members of a “majority group” had to meet a higher standard to prove discrimination. Justices struck down that legal fiction. “The Sixth Circuit has implemented a rule that requires certain Title VII plaintiffs — those who are members of majority groups — to satisfy a heightened evidentiary standard in order to carry their burden under the first step of the McDonnell Douglas framework. We conclude that Title VII does not impose such a heightened standard on majority-group plaintiffs,” wrote Justice Jackson. The decision does not settle the underlying issue: In a return to the Roberts court’s narrow decisions, it merely remands the case with instructions to use the prima facie legal standard.

The welcome ruling reinstates the notion behind the deeply American principle of equal justice under law, itself drawn from the biblical injunction that judges ought not be a respecter of persons. This furthers President Donald Trump’s second-term commitment to undoing discrimination against the nation’s majority in the name of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To its credit, the Roberts court has shown leadership here, too.

As important as the facts of the case are its setting. Ohio, long the bellwether of American politics, rejects DEI. When the U.K.‘s Guardian started a letter-writing campaign for Europeans to pressure Ohioans into voting for Democrat John Kerry over George W. Bush, values voters in rural, western Ohio turned out to support a state constitutional amendment barring the courts from redefining the institution of marriage (or so they thought).

Today, Ohio is a blood-red state. President Donald Trump, perhaps aided by native son Vice President J.D. Vance, won the state by 11 points in 2024; but he also won by eight points in 2020, snapping the state’s reputation for picking a winner in every presidential race. Every statewide office is held by a Republican; it has not voted for a Democrat for president since 2012. Other than the hapless administration of Ted Strickland, shortly after incumbent Republican Bob Taft entered a “no contest” plea to four misdemeanor ethics violations, no Democrat has won a governor’s race since 1986.

Yet those governors have not delivered. Mike DeWine — a former lieutenant governor, U.S. senator, state attorney general, and now governor — vetoed the state SAFE Act, protecting minors from potentially sterilizing transgender injections and surgeries. While he issued an executive order on the topic, he promptly watered down even those temporary provisions. The Republican-controlled state legislature promptly overrode his veto, codifying robust protections for children — just as Ames tried to do throughout her career.

Ohioans have expressed their will for three decades at the ballot box. Meanwhile, unelected bureaucrats advance their radicalism through the HR department by adopting a prescription offered by Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals:”

“From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues. He has nothing with which to confront anything. Until he has those means and power instruments, his 'tactics’ are very different from power tactics. Therefore, every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization, whether by means of local organizations, churches, service groups, labor unions, comer gangs, or as individuals. The only issue is, how will this increase the strength of the organization. If by losing in a certain action he can get more members than by winning, then victory lies in losing and he will lose. Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. Power is the reason for being of organizations.”

Alinksy even likened these left-wing fiefdoms to a church:

“When people agree on certain religious ideas and want the power to propagate their faith, they organize and call it a church. When people agree on certain political ideas and want the power to put them into practice, they organize and call it a political party. The same reason holds across the board. Power and organization are one and the same.”

One hears echoes of this in teachers union president Becky Pringle when she called on her delegates to “build our power” by enrolling everyone “in our righteous cause.” From teachers, to librarians, to HR departments, to district court judges handing down national injunctions, leftists see the workplace as a political battlefield — or, if you believe Alinsky, the mission field to spread a false religion. The Supreme Court decision comes as welcome relief.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.