Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, and religion. Unfortunately, there are many instances in which employers ignore or minimize these guaranteed protections. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to take up Groff v. DeJoy, in which a clear violation of Title VII took place, could act as a means to restore the liberties the public has lost.
Gerald Groff was a USPS employee and a devout Christian who requested that he be given religious accommodation by not working Sundays. He was initially granted permission, but USPS subsequently backtracked on their word and began scheduling Groff for Sunday shifts, which he could not work in good conscience. Worried that he would be terminated, Groff sued under Title VII.
The legal matters boil down to the meaning of “hardship,” a possible defense against religious discrimination. A prior Supreme Court decision on this issue, TWA v. Hardison, rested upon what the justices considered a “de minimis” hardship. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, they said, an employer can only deny a religious accommodation if it poses an undue hardship for the employer. In Groff’s case, there was no showing of a serious hardship on the Postal Service.
The Supreme Court ’s decision to hear Groff’s case is welcome news to discrimination lawyers and to religious people of all persuasions. My own experience with religious freedom cases as the founder and president of the Upper Midwest Law Center, a nonprofit, public interest law firm headquartered in Minnesota, makes this decision especially important to me.
In the past, UMLC has pursued multiple cases that would have been favorably affected by a Supreme Court decision requiring employers and public authorities to do more to avoid religious discrimination. For example, in Northland Baptist Church of St. Paul v. Walz, we sued Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and forced him to stop discriminating against churches, synagogues, and mosques during his COVID-19 shutdown order. We are also currently pursuing cases against several employers, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and AstraZeneca, for their arbitrary denial of religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccine mandates, a type of accommodation directly affected by the “de minimis” rule.
UMLC is also suing employers Honeywell, Hennepin Healthcare, and the Minnesota Department of Health Services for discriminating and retaliating against religious employees who object to extreme gender and critical race theory propaganda in the workplace.
So far, we have won our big case against Walz and several skirmishes in the other cases. However, the overturning of the TWA decision by the Supreme Court in the Groff case would be a sea change in the law and would set a new precedent for these and similar cases in the future.
If people think that cases such as Groff or Northland are only about special protections for certain groups and irrelevant to them, they should think again. Freedom is contagious. Our liberties and freedoms have always started as protections for particular groups, then expanded to others, then to all. The right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, for example, began with protection for a few aristocrats in the Magna Carta, then expanded with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 and the Bill of Rights in 1791. Now, it is a right enjoyed by all.
Just because a case does not apply directly to you at the moment does not mean that the precedent or its expansion will never apply to you. That is why we should all applaud the decision made by the Supreme Court to take up this religious liberty case.
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Doug Seaton, a long-time Minnesota labor and employment law attorney, is the founder and president of the Upper Midwest Law Center.
