US Supreme Court rules federal law protects LGBTQ workers from discrimination

Why should a religious institution be allowed to discriminate against anyone? Many denominations are splitting up because of this issue. The Methodists are splitting up into one part allowing same sex marriage and the other not allowing same sex marriage. Is Methodist Church A going to be allowed to discriminate when hiring/firing while Methodist Church B can’t. A religious exemption can’t be used to harm another person or group of people.

No the churches are not exempt from this ruling. For example, Catholic institutions like parochial schools and hospitals have to adhere to the ruling when hiring and firing. There is going to be a lot of lawsuits from this. I am actually looking forward to AIG being sue on its hiring practices.

Religious institutions have always had special privileges under the US Constitution due to the 1st Amendment. This includes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is the law under discussion here.

Should we change our constitution so that churches are put under the full spectrum of government mandates? That’s a separate discussion. My own opinion is that our current system is not perfect, but pretty dang good. I don’t think it should change. If a church wants to discriminate then let them. As the Bible says, we will know them by their fruits (and yes, the irony of an atheist quoting scripture is noted).

Well, according to US law the religious exemption is real. It could be changed by amending the US Constitution.

You are correct. After a bit of research the exemption seems to be focused on ministers, not staff in general. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

In practical terms, I’m not sure it actually matters much. The best practice for a religious organization that doesn’t want to hire people it doesn’t like is just to be very quiet about it. Quietly don’t hire them, and find ways to shuffle them away when a mistake is made, always attributing the termination, if it’s initiated by the employer, to other reasons.

Employment discrimination cases, despite the sort of lore one hears at some seminars for employers, are difficult to win in cases where there’s ambiguity. What you do NOT want to do is adopt an explicit policy, because that type of action establishes portions of the plaintiff’s claim out of your own mouth. You need to get away with it on the sly.

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My university requires every employee, from the guy who cuts the grass to the university president, to sign a statement of faith and a “lifestyle covenant”. The statement of faith includes a phrase about marriage being between a man and a woman, while the lifestyle covenant prohibits any sex outside of marriage. So theoretically, orientation isn’t the problem but behavior is. We have openly gay students but I don’t see us hiring openly gay faculty, even if nothing in the university rules prohibits it.

That depends on what you mean by “churches”. The Catholic Church would still be able to refuse to ordain homosexual priests and officate same-sex marriages. I don’t think there is any question of that. Would the be able to refuse to hire someone as, say, a custodian because he is gay? I’m not so sure.

A hospital is an institution that serves the general public, so I suspect the ruling would apply there. Private parochial schools? I’m more doubtful about that. And an explicitly religious organization like AIG, which could reasonably be considered to be a “Ministry” might also be exempt for some of its operations, but maybe not for a public business like the Ark Encounter theme park.

The one group of people who never lose in issues like this are lawyers. :slight_smile:

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Praise the Lord, and pass the retainer!

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You are correct that a female can’t sue the Catholic Church for not ordaining her as a priest. But the Civil Rights act is really about hiring and firing discrimination. Take someone applying for a job at Ark Encounter as parking assistant or web designer. Does the applicant have a right to be hired without discrimination?

The Catholic Church has ordained plenty of homosexual priests for hundreds of year.

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I think these statement of faith and lifestyle covenants will need to be modified to comply with the law. I am sure lawyers are looking at them now to see how to proceed.

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Given that they charge for entrance and sell stuff in their stores I would assume they are a business, not a church. This is also why they had to seek out tax incentives. In this case, no one should be discriminated against. I am also aware that their hiring practices have been very suspect, if that is where you are going with this.

Once you are a business then you can’t claim religious exemptions. I think most people would agree with that.

I think most would. Unfortunately, the fundamentalists have been so successful at advancing their culture-war agenda that it’s not clear that this is true any longer. The Hobby Lobby ruling was pretty disturbing.

Separation of church and state is very important, and for reasons which have as much to do with the protection of religious independence as with secular government. But those who, in the culture war, have been seeking to undermine this basic principle of American government and society don’t see it that way. They don’t get it. I even know Mormons who seem to think that a more “Christian” government would be a good thing and who have not apparently figured out that as the list of acceptable beliefs gets winnowed, they’ll be cut out just after the secularists.

The significance of it in its original context is a bit different, but I am reminded of the statement by Coke which is painted around the grand hall of the University of Pennsylvania Law School: “The law is unknown to him that knoweth not the reason thereof; and the knowne certaintie of the law is the safetie of all.”

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Ark Encounter is a for profit business. It sold junk bonds to raise funds. It gets tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. How can it be allowed to discriminate in hiring? I would love to see someone sue them for discrimination.

This gets tricky. It used to be that a facially neutral regulation which impaired some religious belief or practice was generally enforceable if it hadn’t been adopted with ill intent. But there’s always been a weird tension between the Establishment clause and the Free Exercise clause, with Congress having some freedom of action in the no-man’s-land that separates them. Into that no-man’s-land went the absurd and nasty Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides that a neutral law may nonetheless be rendered invalid if it imposes a substantial burden upon the free exercise of someone’s religion and there is no compelling governmental interest involved and the rule is not the least restrictive way to further that interest. All sorts of mischief have followed.

While this was driven at least in part by such things as rulings against the use of peyote in indigenous religious practices, it seems mostly to have been used by fundies, and to some pretty odious ends. To some modern primitives, the free exercise of their religion involves controlling what their employees’ choices of contraceptives are, for example. The courts ought, of course, to reject such asinine propositions, but the fundies have been populating our courts, both through the current and the McFlightsuit administrations, so that religious “free exercise” appears now to be whatever a religious person says it is, even when that “free exercise” has no relation to that person’s liberty but only to the restriction of the liberty of others. These are dark times.

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So would you say that’s a (the) main distinction? The Ark Encounter is a LLC owned by a non-profit so would they be able to claim religious exemptions? What if it’s a sole proprietorship where there might be a handful of employees but the business belongs to a single person and there isn’t a legal distinction between the person and the business? I don’t know the answer to the questions, I’m just thinking out loud a little bit.

Unless there are exemptions for religious non-profits (like most Christian universities), right?

That’s the Hobby Lobby case. The question was whether a corporation could have religious liberties and the Court answered, more or less, that in the case of a closely held corporation it could. Obviously this would not be easy to apply to a broadly held corporation, but for a closely held company we evidently are to impute the views of the holders to the company itself.

I think that’s a bit odd, and at the same time I find people who insist that “corporations aren’t people” for any purpose quite frightening. The way I would analyze it – followed, so far as I know, by no court – is to say that when the rights of the shareholders cannot be defended except by the corporation as their proxy (e.g., denial to the corporation of property without due process of law in violation of the 14th amendment) we should deem the corporation to be a “person” as fully as a natural person, and see it as having due process rights. When, however, those rights are of a more personal nature and do not require the corporation as a vehicle for their defense (e.g., your right to practice your faith) then the corporation does NOT possess the rights of a “person” because its shareholders’ rights are undiluted and uncompromised by the corporate structure.

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I’m only pretending to be a law expert as well. :wink:

From my very limited knowledge, as soon as you are a business then laws and regulations apply without religious exemptions. On a related note, I believe there was a recent ruling that religious groups would lose their tax exempt status if they campaigned for a political candidate. That would make them a political organization instead of a religious organization.

If you think about it, it makes sense. If businesses could skirt regulations and laws by saying they are a religious organization then nearly every business would do it. It would turn into a farce.

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I think I understand what you’re saying, and it seems like a logical distinction.

I think for many conservative Christians there is concern about what “practice your faith” means, and I think perhaps this is where people start speaking past each other. For many of the Christians I know, the issue isn’t trying to mandate that other people adopt Christian religious practices or even ethics, but that they wouldn’t want to be compelled to act contrary to their own beliefs and ethics. So, like in the Hobby Lobby case, if you are a business owner and it is through your faith that you believe that contraception is unethical (basically murder), then being forced to purchase it is significant attack on your living out your faith. If you have a Christian university, a non-profit business entity that is also a community of people practicing their faith, and they have particular religious beliefs concerning sexual ethics (sex outside of one-man-one-woman marriage is wrong, as a common example), then wouldn’t forcing them to provide equal access to on-campus housing to a gay couple be limiting their “right to practice their faith”?

(I always feel like I need a disclaimer at this point) I am not trying to make an argument about whether contraception and gay marriage are right or wrong here, what I’m trying to figure out is how we can think about moving forward in a pluralistic society rather than a “he who has the most votes, defines what’s right and wrong”.

On a practical level, I see this working out as “if free contraception is important to you, why work at Hobby Lobby?” or “why would a gay couple go to a university that doesn’t affirm their marriage?” but when there is compulsion from the state it gets a lot harder in my mind.

[Edit] On a side note, it occurred to me as I was writing this that it seems possible that a lot of these issues would go away if health insurance/ health care was not primarily obtained through your employer.

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That might be how some people have been drummed up to feel, but of course it’s insane and quite unworkable. A Christian Scientist might feel it’s wrong for people to seek medical treatment, and might feel this with the same intensity that a revival-tent Baptist might feel that contraception is wrong, but if he were required to provide health insurance to his employees by a religion-neutral law he’d have no legitimate complaint.

Health insurance is, after all, an employee benefit, and the regulation of it is simply a part of the ordinary regulation of commerce. It’s part of compensation. If I objected to birth control, even if our health plan didn’t cover it, my employees could use the money I pay them to buy it. That’s no different – it simply isn’t reasonable for an employer to expect to be able to make medical choices on his employees’ behalf, and this is not an EXERCISE of freedom of religion – it’s an impairment of it, and if the state grants this power to people in accordance with their religion, it really is (or should properly be viewed as) a violation of the Establishment clause.

I recognize that you’re not really arguing that side, so I’m not so much taking issue with what you say as simply trying to express what is badly wrong with the point of view of someone like the person you describe.

I don’t eat meat. I’ve been a vegetarian since the days when Richard Nixon was president, and my vegetarianism is motivated solely by ethical concerns. I feel that it’d be a better world if more people refrained from eating meat. But I also recognize that these are features of MY conscience, not of someone else’s, and that if I’d like to bring that about, I need to convince people that they should go along. I think that if, as an employer, I insisted that my employees stop eating meat because it offends my sensibilities and because the money I pay them is used to buy food, well, people would tell me that that was not reasonable. If I elevated this claim to being about my “religion,” I don’t think that would make it any more reasonable.

And that, of course, is a worthwhile question (though one does have to remember that the question of what is right and wrong and the question of what should be legal and illegal are not quite the same). But it does have to be remembered that, like it or not, it is mixed with related questions. One question which comes into employment relations quite a bit is whether we live in a “he who has the most economic power defines what’s right and wrong” society. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to recognize that in employment there is often a significant power disparity between employer and employee, and to think that this needs to be mitigated.

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I would think perhaps a closer analogy would be if you provided a staff lunch and so purchased vegetarian options for everyone. If someone complained about not having any meat, should you be compelled to purchase it? I can imagine saying “bring your own meat if you want”, but it seems odd to think the owner is obligated to go against their conscience in this case (even if, as a non-vegetarian, it’s annoying). Your rights as the food provider/purchaser, would seem to trump my desire for meat options. Now, before I get blasted, I fully understand that “I want some meat to eat for lunch” is not comparable to health care, I’m just trying to follow the analogy.