SNL's "It's Pat" sketch was brought up at U.S. Supreme Court's LGBTQ hearing

The Advocate

In Tuesday's U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments over whether existing civil rights law covers anti-LGBTQ discrimination, Julia Sweeney's Pat character was brought up. Pat appeared in the early 1990s as a character of indeterminate gender. Pamela Karlan, the lawyer representing workers who say they were fired for being gay, discussed Pat in her argument that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. “If a woman had come in and said, ‘I like to date men,’ you wouldn’t have fired her, and when a man says, ‘I like to date men,’ you did, that’s enough to show sex discrimination,” Karlan said, according to a court transcript. Karlan tried to explain Pat to Justice Samuel Alito, but he wasn't familiar with the character. “Theoretically that person might be out there," Karlan said. "But here is the key: The — the cases that are brought are almost all brought by somebody who says my employer knew who I was and fired me because I was a man or fired me because I was a woman. Somebody who comes in and says I’m not going to tell you what my sex is, but, believe me, I was fired for my sexual orientation, that person will lose.”

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