8 posts were split to a new topic: Marcus Ross at Liberty
Interesting question. First, the obvious answer is “no,” not as such, they’re not. However, religion IS a protected category and so a person who believes the earth is 6,000 years old because Zorg from the planet Wxytlplat told him this in a dream is not protected but someone who believes this on an equally valid, equally evidentiarily-solid, but religious, ground may be protected. But that’s not the end of it.
Title VII contains this interesting passage:
Now, the obvious application of this is to employment where the work itself involves religious practice. Nobody would expect the Catholic Church to open its hiring of priests to Protestants, for example. But note that it does not stop there. If there is a bona fide occupational qualification which the potential employee does not meet due to his religion, he may indeed be discriminated against, expressly and intentionally, on that basis.
I don’t know of a case where it’s been litigated and I may ask around to see if some of my employment discrimination friends do (my work was in civil rights litigation, but seldom in employment-type civil rights work). But I think it’d be a very, very tough argument for a YEC, suing for having been denied a job as an instructor, who insisted that although he did not believe one damned word of the curriculum, he was prepared to teach it as he was asked and would not let this influence his work. I think the court would say that whether this was or was not possible or was reasonable was really the sort of matter that the employer, in its own exercise of its own discretion, was entitled to accept or reject.
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And to be clear on a job interview you couldn’t ask a candidate for a faculty position say in geology at a public university if they believe in God or if they are a Christian but you could ask them their position on the age of the earth. If they said they think the earth is 6,000 years old because the Bible tells them so or was popped into existence last Thursday by the magical intervention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster you could legally not hire them over another candidate, right?
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. You absolutely would be breaking the law if you said, “well, Catholics (or Protestants, or Sikhs, or any other religious group) aren’t suitable to teach geology.” But you could ask an applicant for an instructor position to state his views on geological topics, and if you discovered that he believed the earth was 6,000 years old, my sense of the statute is that you could explicitly say “we will not hire you because of that belief” and that this would hold up in court.
Now, again, as I have said, I haven’t had the chance to look this up. To really have a thoroughly vetted answer to this question one needs to consult the case law and see the ways in which courts have applied the bona fide occupational qualification language. That could add some complication to the issue, but with that disclaimer, this is how I see the statute. If I had a client who had to consider how to handle a situation like this, I’d go spend a few hours in the law library, digging, to be more sure whether that’s right.
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And if the position were say a history professor at a public university you definitely could ask a candidate if they believed the Holocaust or the moon landing really happened and deny their employment on that basis since both are historical questions and under no reasonable argument necessary articles of any religious faith. There the law would be even more cut-and-dry, correct?
I have mixed feelings about the whole question. A YEC could do, say, solid state physics without difficulty. When it comes to fields that touch directly on YEC, there are people who are capable of such compartmentalization that they can accurately assess the evidence for evolution while still rejecting it – Todd Wood, for example, and… okay, there is a person capable of that kind of compartmentalization. No problem there.
My problem is that the vast majority of YECs that I’ve encountered either offer scientific arguments in favor of a young earth (which are invariably quite bad, scientifically speaking), or they adopt a kind of low rent postmodernism that says our conclusions are entirely determined by starting assumptions. (Or both, of course.) I don’t see how someone adopting either approach could make a good scientist.
There is only one Ivy League school near Boston (it kind of slops over into Boston), so if you weren’t intending to identify that school by your periphrasis, you should reword it.
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I’m not suggesting that it is the exact same legal issue but this thread has jogged my memories concerning the very interesting court case of Cal State v Armitage.
He was doing electron microscope maintenance for a university department but apparently interacted with students in informal ways concerning his YEC beliefs, which the university considered inappropriate to their educational mission. He won the case and then got a cash settlement. (I had some Internet exchanges with him years ago and I will just say he is a very interesting fellow. We did not see eye to eye all that well even though we probably share many theological beliefs in common.)
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Looking at EEOC guidance (and this sort of thing is granted some deference by courts), I find this statement:
(footnotes omitted). That actually makes me think EEOC might say that a belief that the earth is 6,000 years old doesn’t even qualify as a “religious” one within the meaning of the statute.
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As far as I understand it Armitage was on soft money so he never had a permanent position to begin with.
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And Armitage managed to walk away with a nice chuck of additional money.
I would think that given so many Christians are not YEC that fact would speak to that argument. Other crackpot ideas like Holocaust denial or flat earthers would be even further removed from a religious umbrella of protection.
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They should’ve fought him on it but I’m sure it wasn’t worth paying the lawyers.
It is interesting – but of course the issues with a lab manager are different from the issues with an instructor. I see references online to a decision in a “Motion for Adjudication,” which is a process I am unfamiliar with though it may simply be a strange California expression meaning a motion for summary judgment. I don’t seem to be able to find a copy of the ruling anywhere. Since it was in a state court, my guess is that California anti-discrimination law may have been more favorable to him than federal law.
Yes, the university asked for summary judgment.
I think what turned the tide and led them to pay Armitage the $400,000 was that one of the professor’s allegedly told Armitage “We don’t need any of your religion in our department.” I never determined whether there were any witnesses to that “confrontation” but the word going around at that time was that once the university lawyers learned that religion had been mentioned in association with the termination (or was it a non-renewal of the contract?), the lawyers wanted to settle.
So, I would say that if you suspect someone holds crackpot ideas completely at odds with the field you are potentially hiring them to work in it would be a hiring committee’s duty to determine the veracity of those suspicions within the bounds the law allows. No history department should knowingly hire a Holocaust denier or someone who thinks the moon landing were a hoax. Medical schools should not hire candidates who seriously doubt the germ theory of disease. And geology departments should not hire candidates who think the earth is 6,000 years old. It would seem that none of those conditions would constitute a violation of employment law in the United States. Even if faculty keep these views secret no faculty wants dishonest educators or disingenuous researchers prone to conspiracies.
Yeah that was a mistake. Has someone not said that they likely could’ve just let him go.
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Do you think a medical school should be able to fire a professor who believes in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus? One could argue that such a belief goes against medical science.
No. That’s a legitimate religious belief. It’s not as if they believe their patients will magically resurrect themselves. If they believed that then they shouldn’t be hired.
I’ll ask you Daniel. Should you refuse to hire a candidate for a faculty position in history because you learn they deny the Holocaust?
Or what if a physician refuses to resuscitate a patient because they have a religious belief that God will raise them from the dead?