The Washington (State) Supreme Court has held that the 2006 amendments to the Washington Law Against Discrimination (which added “sexual orientation” as a protected class) were not retroactive. As a result, a University of Washington employee could not sue for sexual orientation-based harassment based on alleged anti-homosexual comments made by her supervisor prior to the effective date of the amendment.
However…
The Court also noted that that this same pre-amendment conduct could still be relevant to “prove intent behind postamendment conduct.” And in this case, there was one allegedly hostile act that took place after the effective date of the amendment to the WLAD. According to the plaintiff, this same supervisor had stated, in reference to the prospect of dealing with the plaintiff’s homosexuality, that he was “going to come back a very angry man” when returning from a tour in Iraq.
That was enough for the Supreme Court, which held that the plaintiff’s hostile environment claim should survive, since the “angry man” comment was sufficiently severe when illumined against the background of the earlier pre-amendment anti-gay statements.
The case is Loeffelholz v. University of Washington.
The Personnel Files 