The
Supreme Court
will hear a case in which a
Protestant
employee claims the
United States Postal Service
failed to provide him with religious accommodations. USPS scheduled him to work on Sunday despite his willingness to work other shifts.
Religious employees with sincere beliefs should be given reasonable accommodations.
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Gerald Gruff had been working for USPS since 2012 in Pennsylvania, first as a mail carrier. When Sunday deliveries began at a different post, Groff, a devout Christian, asked for religious accommodation. At first, the postmaster granted that request so long as Groff filled in additional days and shifts, which he did. Later, USPS backtracked. At times, it scheduled Groff for Sunday shifts for which he didn’t show. Believing that he was facing termination from his job, Groff resigned and sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So far, the lower courts have upheld USPS’s actions, concluding that accommodating Groff any more than it did would pose an undue hardship on USPS.
Groff and his attorneys are arguing that, as a federal employee with USPS, he was protected by Title VII from discrimination based on his religious beliefs and practices. This is the perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to correct a poor precedent, set in TWA v. Hardison, that lowered accommodation claims under Title VII.
Already, the case has made a stir. “A new Supreme Court case could turn every workplace into a religious battleground,” a
Vox
headline read
. “The fight over whether religious conservatives enjoy special rights is coming to a workplace near you,” the subhead read. At
Slate
, Mark Joseph Stern wrote, “Today religion cases more frequently involve conservative Christians’ right to discriminate against others.” After listing several prominent religious liberty cases the Supreme Court has heard, he wrote, “In each case, Christians’ religious freedom to discriminate trumped others’ freedom from discrimination.”
Left out here is a basic point: It is most likely that there are more religious liberty cases involving the Christian religion as opposed to Islam, or another religion, simply because Christianity is the most prominent religion in the U.S. Religious accommodation should be afforded within a certain set of standards. That need not mean imposing unfair burdens on an employer.
There should be a way for the Supreme Court to satisfy the rights of both the employer and religious employees. Hopefully, the court will advance that interest here.
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Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
