Cite as: 527 U. S. 471 (1999)
Stevens, J., dissenting
ments." Arline, 480 U. S., at 284-285. Even if an authorized agency could interpret this statutory structure so as to pick and choose certain correctable impairments that Congress meant to exclude from this mandate, Congress surely has not authorized us to do so.
When faced with classes of individuals or types of discrimination that fall outside the core prohibitions of anti-discrimination statutes, we have consistently construed those statutes to include comparable evils within their coverage, even when the particular evil at issue was beyond Congress' immediate concern in passing the legislation. Congress, for instance, focused almost entirely on the problem of discrimination against African-Americans when it enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See, e. g., Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U. S. 193, 202-203 (1979). But that narrow focus could not possibly justify a construction of the statute that excluded Hispanic-Americans or Asian-Americans from its protection—or as we later decided (ironically enough, by relying on legislative history and according "great deference" to the EEOC's "interpretation"), Caucasians. See McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transp. Co., 427 U. S. 273, 279-280 (1976).
We unanimously applied this well-accepted method of interpretation last Term with respect to construing Title VII to cover claims of same-sex sexual harassment. Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U. S. 75 (1998). We explained our holding as follows:
"As some courts have observed, male-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII. But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed. Title VII prohibits 'discriminat[ion] . . . because of . . . sex' in the 'terms' or 'conditions'
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