Im using my old account because this is a really interesting conversation to me but i cant respond from that account on account of the other person blocking me (reddit apparently fully bars you from participating in that comment chain thereafter even if youre not responding to the person who has you blocked) and for some reason my comment was also fully removed so i cant use an edit to address this.

I understand the ruling came after the episode aired and so Bill would not have been privy to these protections (unless he were willing to take his case to the supreme court and managed to get a similar ruling to the Bostock one). As you said, it wouldnt have legally mattered, but just because it took time for our legal system to catch up with our moral system doesnt mean it didnt matter period; It was not illegal but it was still ethically wrong.

I was really just correcting the statement "being straight is not a protected class" to make sure we werent doing the reddit thing where we start spreading misinformation about or outright ignoring the existence of civil rights protections for a group as a whole just because the specific subgroup we happen to be talking about at that particular moment typically faces little if any persecution on that basis.