Earlier this month, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) signed Executive Order 10-24, “adding employment protections based on sexual orientation to the Executive Branch of Missouri state government.” The measure, which went largely unreported in the press, does not explicitly extend protections for gender identity, but PROMO, the state LGBT group, told me they received assurances from the Attorney General that discrimination against gender would not be tolerated. From the text:

The executive branch of the State of Missouri shall ensure that all present and prospective employees are afforded equal opportunity at all levels and phases of employment within state government with respect to, but not limited to, hiring, recruiting, training, benefits, promotions, transfers, layoffs, demotions, terminations, rate of compensation, and recalls from layoffs. It shall be the responsibility of the State Office of Equal Employment Opportunity to monitor all departments of the executive branch of state government and assist them to ensure equal employment opportunity. The State of Missouri shall work to ensure that there will be no vestiges of discrimination against persons on account of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, ancestry, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability; not only in employment practices but in the provision of services and the operation of facilities.

PROMO see the order as a big step forward for a state that became the first in the nation to ban same sex marriages in 2004 (that amendment “picked up 70 percent of the vote and was endorsed in every county but St. Louis city”), and believes that it signals the governor’s support for The Missouri Nondiscrimination Act (MONA), a measure that would extend anti-discrimination protections to public and private institutions.

But the governor’s spokesperson, Scott Holste, cautioned me against viewing this as a move in that direction. “The Governor believes that Missouri should work to ensure that there won’t be any vestiges of discrimination,” Holste said, but stressed that Nixon has not expressed support for a broader anti-discrimination measure that goes beyond the Executive branch. “That’s an issue that we will have to address at another time,” he said. Nixon’s order is the first of its kind in Missouri.

Earlier this year, the Arizona legislature eliminated funding for KidsCare, the state health program covering 38,000 children of the working poor, to help close the state’s $5 billion budget gap. By ending the program, the state forfeited billions of dollars in federal matching funds and left uninsured children with few health care options. After health care reform passed — the law requires states that want to continue receiving federal health care funds to maintain eligibility in Medicaid and CHIP — Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) realized that the cuts would have meant that the state would lose millions in federal matching funds and “urged legislators to restore the programs.”

Unfortunately that wouldn’t be the first time the state of Arizona cut vital services in an effort to balance the budget and then was forced to reverse course. Last September, in yet another effort to plug a spending hole, Brewer “eliminated health benefits to the spouses of domestic partners – gay or straight,” adversely affecting same-sex couples who “cannot marry in the state.” Now that too will be revered.

On Friday, a federal judge rejected the state’s claim that “the elimination of benefits will not harm the families of gay and lesbian employees because they may still be able to obtain insurance privately, through Medicaid or via the employers of the non-public employee partner.” From Lambda Legal, which sued the state on behalf of 10 state employee “who rely on health benefits from their employers to safeguard their families’ health“:

“Even assuming that is true,” Sedwick writes, citing a 9th Circuit Court ruling in Lambda Legal’s ongoing case In re Golinski, “the Ninth Circuit has recognized there is ‘an inherent inequality’ in allowing some employees to participate fully in the State’s health plan, while expecting other employees to rely on other sources, such as private insurance or Medicaid. ‘This back of the bus’ treatment relegates plaintiffs to a second-class status by imposing inferior workplace treatment on them, inflicting serious constitutional and dignitary harms that after-the-fact damages cannot adequately address.”

“This injunction removes the sword that’s been hanging over the heads of hundreds of state workers and their families,” said Tara Borelli, the Lambda Legal staff attorney who argued the case on June 28.

There is one other interesting point about all of this. The state’s effort to deny government-sponsored health care benefits to domestic partners coincided with its campaign to undo health care reform in the state. Arizona is both challenging the constitutionality of health care reform in court and hopes to eliminate the individual health insurance mandate through a ballot measure in November. Had the Judge not issued his injunction and these repeal measures were at all successful, gay couples in Arizona would actually have very few health care choices.

The New York Times reports on a pair of studies, one of which studies Supreme Court voting paterns since 1937, which find that the Roberts Court is the most conservative Supreme Court in recent history:

Four of the six most conservative justices of the 44 who have sat on the court since 1937 are serving now: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and, most conservative of all, Clarence Thomas. (The other two were Chief Justices Burger and Rehnquist.) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the swing justice on the current court, is in the top 10.

The Roberts court is finding laws unconstitutional and reversing precedent — two measures of activism — no more often than earlier courts. But the ideological direction of the court’s activism has undergone a marked change toward conservative results. . . .

It is the ideological direction of the decisions that has changed. When the Rehnquist court struck down laws, it reached a liberal result more than 70 percent of the time. The Roberts court has tilted strongly in the opposite direction, reaching a conservative result 60 percent of the time.

The Rehnquist court overruled 45 precedents over 19 years. Sixty percent of those decisions reached a conservative result. The Roberts court overruled eight precedents in its first five years, a slightly lower annual rate. All but one reached a conservative result.

If anything, this data understates the Roberts Court’s rightward drift.  Because the Supreme Court largely gets to choose which cases it wants to hear, a conservative Court will not simply move the law to the right by handing down conservative opinions, it will also do so by hand-selecting cases that achieve conservative results.  In 2008-09 term, for example, the Supreme Court handed down five decisions cutting back environmental law.  Such an event could not have occurred without the justices taking the unusual step of agreeing to hear five environmental cases in a single term.

Moreover, even though American now suffers under the most right-wing Supreme Court in seven decades, right-wing lawmakers are demanding a Court that is even more extreme.  Conservatives repeatedly attacked Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for taking positions on health reform and the Second Amendment that are also embraced by ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia.  And some senators even embraced a discredited “tenther” view of the Constitution that would declare child labor laws, the federal ban on whites only lunch counters and potentially even Social Security unconstitutional.

It remains to be seen how far the Roberts Court will go in embracing this deeply radical agenda.  John Roberts has only been Chief for five years — and he could have many decades left to replace hard-fought laws with his own right-wing values.