“The civil rights act of 1964 is the cornerstone of employment-discrimination law. It prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Under Title VII, executive orders were issued that banned employment discrimination by firms that received any federal funding. (Steffen W. Schmidt, 2014)” This law was tested with very well known cases in the American government. One of the first cases was titled “Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka”. The root of this case all started because each day, Linda Brown and her sister had to walk through a dangerous area to get to the bus stop for the ride to their all-black elementary school. There was a school closer to the Brown 's house, but it was only for Caucasian students. Linda Brown and her family believed that the segregated school system violated the Fourteenth Amendment and took their case to court and lost but that did not stop them. The Browns then appealed their case to Supreme Court and the Court decided that state laws requiring separate-but-equal schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth …show more content…
Another minority group, the most recent, that is being discriminated by the American government is the gay community. America is, although some argue it is not, a faith based county. It was founded on Christian principals and that is why the gay community is such a big deal for the government to accept and recognized. In 1998, eyes were opened to the issue of accepting gays. A student named Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten, tortured, tied to a fence post, and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming, because he was believed to be gay. Hate crime was not an existing label so his killers could not be charged with hate crime because at the time, the state law did not recognize sexual orientation as a protected class. The government did noting because under the American law, “sexual orientation” was not a class. To further push gay recognition under the rug, “In 1993 President Clinton announced a new policy, generally characterized as “don’t ask, don’t tell (Steffen W. Schmidt, 2014)”. Enlistees, in the military, would not be asked about their sexual orientation, and gays and lesbians would be allowed to serve in the military so long as they did not declare that they were gay or lesbian or commit homosexual acts. This may have seemed to satisfy part of the gay community but not all. They saw it unfit that they were not allowed to express their true self and feeling and were being