USCCB backs former post office employee in Supreme Court religious-liberty case
March 01, 2023
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Groff v. DeJoy, a pending Supreme Court case.
The bishops’ conference joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Anti-Defamation League in support of Gerald Groff, the petitioner in the case.
Groff, an evangelical Protestant and a former US Postal Service employee, declined to work on Sunday—something expected of postal workers after the postal service contracted with Amazon.com to deliver its packages. A Supreme Court precedent, TWA, Inc. v. Hardison (1978), allows employers not to accommodate religious exemptions when they are deemed to cause “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.”
“Americans shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and their faith,” the USCCB and other religious organizations argued in their brief, as they urged the Supreme Court to overturn the 1978 decision. “For decades, employees have been routinely denied religious accommodations.”
They continued:
Many reasons counsel in favor of abandoning Hardison. To us, its personal and societal costs are paramount.
Sincere religious beliefs and practices often require observing a Sabbath day or other holy days, complying with particular dress standards, or wearing religious symbols. Accommodating religious beliefs and practices should not be left to an employer’s discretion.
Civil rights are not an issue of good manners only. Discriminating because of an employee’s religion, including by refusing to reasonably accommodate religious practices without good cause, is unlawful—and this Court should say so.
Sadly, Hardison falls heaviest on religious minorities and the economically vulnerable. For them, the right of exit—the freedom to find another employer with a more generous outlook—often proves to be a chimera.
The USCCB and the other religious organizations also expressed alarm at an appellate court ruling in the case that stretched the meaning of “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business” to include “affect[ing] other employees or reduci[ng] employee morale.”
“Coworkers may grumble when an employee gets time off on Saturday to observe her Sabbath,” the brief argued. “But denying a religious accommodation because of popular opposition is a dangerous principle that subverts the very purpose of a civil rights statute. The meaning of individual rights would shrivel if they depended on a show of hands. The Court should declare that—extreme situations aside—an employer cannot establish ‘an undue hardship’ merely because it would affect an employee’s coworkers.”
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