The question here is what standard courts should apply in matters of reverse discrimination. The question is laid out in The Wall Street Journal article’s lede:

Amid a MAGA-led backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, the Supreme Court on Wednesday will consider an issue that has split judges around the country: what do white people and other members of a majority group have to prove to win a claim for reverse discrimination?

(Aside: the newswriters’—Jess Bravin and Erin Mulvaney—irrelevant reference to MAGA illustrates their own and their editor’s political bias.)

The question is expanded in the second paragraph [emphasis added]:

Marlean Ames claims the Ohio state agency where she works denied her a promotion and then demoted her because she is heterosexual, instead giving both her old job and the one she had sought to gay people. A federal appeals court in Cincinnati threw out Ames’s lawsuit, finding that she failed to show the “background circumstances” suggesting the employer was hostile to straight people—a threshold step that wouldn’t have been required had a gay employee claimed discrimination.

As the writers noted shortly after:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination because of an “individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin….”

Lauren Hartz, DC-located partner in Jenner & Block raised this bit:

We are in disagreement about what groups in American society today are advantaged or disadvantaged[.]

This is a wholly constructed and cynically dragged red herring. The only advantaged groups are those groups of Americans who get favorable treatment from our courts compared to other groups of Americans, and the only disadvantaged groups of Americans are those groups of Americans at whose expense that advantageous treatment comes.

Civil rights groups have raised another irrelevancy:

Many civil-rights groups say the occasional example of reverse discrimination doesn’t change history. Courts, according to a brief filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, should be able to consider the “realities of this country’s persisting legacy of discrimination.”

The supposedly “occasional” nature of reverse discrimination is no excuse for any amount of that form of discrimination. Neither does it excuse the creation of a new legacy of discrimination for our future.

Thus: how about using the same standard for all cases involving allegations of discrimination?

How about judges and Justices hew to the text of black letter law and to the foundational text of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution?

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That’s it in black and white; it’s not that hard to understand and to apply. As a Chief Justice of our Supreme Court said not so long ago, The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

There is no excuse for our court system, nor any judge or Justice within it, applying different standards of adjudication to different groups of Americans. Judges and Justices are violating their oaths of office when they do.