The Supreme Court (five hard line right wingers and a not uncommonly reliable conservative) are about to consider the case of Gerald Groff. Supreme Court takes up Christian postal worker's religious claim (msn.com) Groff is described as an evangelical Christian, and he complained that the USPS assigned him to work Sunday shifts, which would have conflicted with his "day of worship and rest." (We are given no information as to what else Groff may have done with his Sundays, such as go on family outings, play golf, watch football games, or anything else. All we're told is that he didn't want to have to work at his job. Initially, he was spared Sunday shifts, but this changed in 2015, when the USPS was given the responsibility to deliver "(Sc)Amazon" packages on Sundays. Who demanded that the USPS deliver "(Sc)Amazon" packages on Sundays, when the USPS does not deliver mail, and what persuaded them to impose this responsibility, is another matter for another time.) Groff's complaint was that the USPS had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and created workplace discrimination and an "undue hardship," by assigning him to a shift that conflicted with what he said were his religious preferences.
In any event, let's go back, before we go forward. Everyone knows that the Pilgrims came to the "New World" to escape religious persecution, and that the US Consitution guarantees separation of "church" and state, and prohibits the establishment of a federally imposed religion. Most Americans know this very well, and don't complain about it, even if some of them less formally tell themselves that the USA is somehow a Christian country. (It isn't.) So, more or less from the outset, apart from proselytizing and beating up on Native Americans, whose spiritual orientations were neither adequately known nor considered of any importance or relevance (still today, among the non-Native Americans), and apart from various forms of personal prejudices, including religion-based ones, we have agreed that up to a point, people can carry out their religious beliefs as they wish. We do not, of course, agree to allow any religionists to engage in religion-based human sacrifice, nor do we allow polygamy, and if anyone good enough to be a professional football player, for example, said he refused to play in games that occurred on Sundays, we (the government; the Supreme Court) would not honor that self-restriction. And frankly, there are no doubt many Christians in professional football, but they're devoted enough to their (usually short) careers that they are pleased to play in Sunday games. They figure out some other way to satisfy whatever they think are their religious obligations or preferences. Was Groff frankly not that devoted to working for the USPS? It may be a good question. He is described as an auxiliary, non-career, fill-in for other employees who were sometimes unavailable, like ON WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS!. That doesn't exactly sound like the recipe for a deeply devoted worker. And now that the SCOTUS is as hard right as it is, it has suddenly taken more of an interest in accepting these religion-based cases. Hence, our look back, and the problematic title of this post.
The commonest reference case for this problem (dealing with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) is Trans-World Airlines vs Hardison in 1977. Hardison is described as having been a member of something called the Worldwide Church of God, and he said that his church considered Saturday the "Sabbath." TWA attempted to accommodate Hardison's claim of religious restriction by transferring him from one work setting to another, but his seniority level didn't transfer with him. That was his complaint. Trans World Airlines v. Hardison | The First Amendment Encyclopedia (mtsu.edu) The SCOTUS ruled against him, saying that the employer had made a reasonable attempt to accommodate his religious wish, and he just couldn't have everything (the transfer that kept him from working Saturdays, and his seniority level). It's as if someone bought a Kia, because they couldn't afford a Rolls Royce, but then decided the Kia wasn't car enough for them. So now, they wanted the Rolls Royce after all, but since you can get a car for the cost of a Kia (they knew that for a fact, because they had one), then they expected to receive the Rolls Royce for the price of a Kia. It don't work like that, as Hardison learned.
The nasty and difficult part of this is if we look further back, to the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The construction of this Act was begun by "radical Republicans" (today, we would call them left-leaning Democrats) in 1870, and it was sort of aimed at two things. One was the treatment of Native/indigenous Americans, and the other was the treatment of African-Americans. One of the important sticking points of this Act was the insistence of enough people in Congress that the Act only apply to the federal government, but not to the private sector. So a lot of anti-civil rights mischief continued to get made. Until...
From Wikipedia: "In the 1930s, during the New Deal, the majority of the Supreme Court justices gradually shifted their legal theory to allow for greater government regulation of the private sector...thus paving the way for the federal government to enact civil rights laws prohibiting both public and private sector discrimination." If there's anyone Reps/cons hate as much as they hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it's...FDR. And he signed Executive Order 8802, and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional, southern Democrats (they're Republicans today) responded with "massive resistance," and Eisenhower ("RINO" today) signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. There were some attempted and some completed reworkings after that, when Kennedy and then Johnson were presidents. There were various SCOTUS cases after that, too.
And that will be part of the basis for the now hard right SCOTUS to decide what to do about Gerald Groff's complaint. If they give him all the religion-based accommodation he wants, they'll owe it all to left wingers. And these "originalists" will have to ignore the facts that 1) Americans are all about not being pushed around by religion, especially someone else's, 2) they can practice whatever they tell themselves are their religious preferences, and the government won't stop them, but they can't use their religious preference to control other Americans any more than the US can use religion to control them, and 3) there are limits.
It's an interesting problem, and it will be interesting to see how the SCOTUS tries to deal with it.
Here's a much more erudite discussion of this problem: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-silver-lining-of-the-supreme-court-s-next-harmful-religious-liberty-ruling/ar-AA16u9qu?cvid=bb8a4de8fac04b5598826661a8d30a6b
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that Groff is arguing that his religion requires him to observe Sabbath every Sunday. Groff doesn't say if that means all day, for 24 hours, on Sunday, and there is no indication whether he does anything with his Sundays except observe Sabbath. (No NFL, right?) I'm also reminded of the churches that decades ago began to have "Sunday" masses on Saturday afternoons or evenings, presumably because parishioners didn't want to wake up early Sunday morning to go to church. Apparently, there are various ways to accomplish the religious goal.
The same is very true of Orthodox Jews, who find ways to bend or reconstruct the rules so they can do what they want instead of what their scripture tells them to do. The "Shabbos Goy" is an old accommodation, and there are many more. I will never forget the night I was invited to dinner at the home of Orthodox Jewish friends on a Friday. After dinner, the wife wanted espresso coffee. Naturally, she couldn't use the electric espresso maker. It would have made her look better if she had asked me to press the "on" button, but instead, she pressed the paw of her pet cat on the button.
You manage to do what you want to do. So, Groff didn't want to work, and he wants the USPS/government to pay him anyway. "Nice work, if you can get it."