Here’s a bit of hopeful news to start your week: A federal appeals court in Chicago appears poised to extend a federal bar on employment discrimination to LGBTQ Americans. Ian Millhiser of Think Progress reports in “The most important gay rights case since marriage equality was won”:

Americans enjoy a fundamental right to marry, regardless of whether they are straight, bisexual, or gay. Yet, in more than half of the states, “a person can be married on Saturday and then fired on Monday for just that act,” as one federal court explained in a recent opinion. There is no federal law that explicitly protects workers from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Moreover, while there are very strong arguments that existing protections against gender discrimination are broad enough to protect sexual minorities in the workplace, the courts have largely rejected these arguments. As a result, if you live in one of the 28 states that does not forbid discrimination against gay and bisexual workers, you can be fired because of the person you love. A federal appeals court appears poised to change that, however, at least in the three states overseen by that court. And should the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit hold, in a case known as Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, that current law already protects workers who are attracted to members of the same sex, the case would likely be on the fast track to the Supreme Court. Hively, or a similar case, could transform the nation’s LGBT rights landscape no less than the Court’s marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. And there are strong signs that the Seventh Circuit is prepared to rule in favor of workplace equality.

As Millhsier goes on to explain, court interpretations of federal anti-sex discrimination law have come to make little sense since, quite weirdly, they protect lesbians and gay men who fulfill stereotypes of those classes, but not those who don’t. Here’s the conclusion:

The law, as it exists in many courts, “protects ‘flamboyant’ gay men and ‘butch’ lesbians but not the lesbian or gay employee who act and appear straight.” A male employee can be fired for being gay, but only if they aren’t into fashion. There is a strong early sign, however, that the Seventh Circuit wants to eliminate this anomaly. Judge Rovner wrote her opinion in Hively on behalf of a three-judge panel?—?most court of appeals decisions are disposed of this way. Last Tuesday, however, the full Seventh Circuit announced that it would rehear the case using an unusual procedure known as en banc review. En banc hearings are rarely granted, and when they are granted in a case where existing appeals court precedents clearly require the outcome reached by the three-judge panel, that is often a sign that the full court wishes to overrule those precedents. The fact that Judge Rovner spent much of her Hively opinion criticizing these precedents also suggests that they won’t be around very long. If the full Seventh Circuit does hold that current federal law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, that will place the Seventh Circuit at odds with several other courts of appeals?—?and the Supreme Court typically steps in to resolve these conflicts. Add into the mix the fact that the Supreme Court is likely to be more liberal in a year than it has ever been at any point in the Court’s history, and that opens up the very real possibility that workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will be illegal throughout the entire nation.

Keep your fingers crossed and click here to read Millhiser’s entire story.