With two significant rulings, the Supreme Court has made legal history. In the beginning, they decided against colleges utilizing affirmative action in the admissions process. And now, the Court has rendered another crucial ruling concerning religious liberty in the matter of Groff v. DeJoy, Postmaster General. This lawsuit centered on Mr. Groff, a Christian mailman who objected to working on Sundays because it interfered with his Shabbat observance.
The fourth of the renowned Bible’s Ten Commandments commands that “the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy God, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gate…[ for the Lord] rested on the seventh day; wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
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Mr. Groff believes that Sunday is the Shabbat, thus to work on that day would go against his religious beliefs. According to Fox News, Groff’s attorney said in court back in April that “the court should revisit a 50-year-old precedent that established a test to determine when employers should make accommodations for their employees’ religious practices.”
According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are required to “reasonably accommodate” the religious practices and beliefs of their workers as long as doing so does not put a “undue hardship” on the company. A Supreme Court precedent case from 1977 stated that corporations might refuse to provide religious accommodations if they could demonstrate that doing so would incur “more than a de minimis cost.”
The de minimis criteria should be abandoned, according to Groff’s counsel, who also contended that religious accommodations should be carefully interpreted in accordance with Title VII. The de minimis threshold did not hold up, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed with Groff’s attorney. As Justice Jackson and liberal Justice Sotomayor noted in their concurring opinion, “both parties here agree, the phrase “more than a de minimis cost”…was loose language.”
In the official decision of the Court, Justice Alito said that “We hold that showing “more than a de minimis cost,” as that phrase is used in common parlance, does not suffice to establish “undue hardship” under Title VII…As we have explained, we do not write on a blank slate in determining what an employer must prove to defend a denial of a religious accommodation, but we think it reasonable to begin with Title VII’s text.”
The legal world has reacted positively to the news and noted how this ruling may be applied to more situations that are similar to this one. Robert Barnes, a constitutional attorney, was one of these voices, noting “Big decision today by [the Supreme Court] unanimously agreeing that employers cannot discriminate against religious employees unless it would be a “substantial” cost to accommodate them. This makes it much easier to win the lawsuits against vaccine mandates, and help those fired b/c of them.”
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