Clifford Norton arrested on suspicion of homosexuality

Arrested in Lafayette Square on suspicion of homosexuality, Clifford Norton was fired by NASA after the Metropolitan Police reported to his employer.

He sought support from the new Mattachine Society of Washington, the first such employment discrimination case taken on by MSW. After losing at several levels of adjudication, on July 1, 1969 the US Court of Appeals found in Norton's favor: "the notion that it could be an appropriate function of the Federal bureaucracy to enforce the majority's conventional codes of conduct in theprivate lives of its employees is at war with the elementary concepts of liberty, privacy, and diversity."