Supreme Court to decide how far employers must go to accommodate workers’ religious beliefs
Story by John Fritze, USA TODAY, 1/13/23
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a case that could decide how far employers must go to accommodate the religious beliefs of employees.
Gerald Groff, a former mail carrier in Pennsylvania, sued the U.S. Postal Service after it required him to work Sunday shifts delivering packages. Groff, who resigned in 2019, is a Christian and believes Sundays should be dedicated to worship, court records show.
Federal law requires companies to make accommodations for their workers’ religious beliefs as long as it doesn’t present an “undue hardship.” In 1977, the Supreme Court defined “undue hardship” as anything having more than a “de minimis,” or trivial cost. That means employers can avoid making accommodations in many situations.
In a similar case that the court declined to hear in 2021, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a dissent joined by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, asserted the standard allows “subpar employees” to receive more favorable treatment than highly performing workers if the latter group seeks only to attend church.
“There is no barrier to our review and no one else to blame,” Gorsuch wrote. “The only mistake here is of the court’s own making – and it is past time for the court to correct it.”
In Groff’s case, a U.S. District Court ruled that exempting Groff from Sunday deliveries would cause undue hardship to USPS. The Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld that decision last year. But the Supreme Court has taken an increasingly favorable view of religious freedom claims, such as by siding last year with a public high school football coach who wanted to pray in the middle of the field after games.
It was one of several new cases the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear later this year as it fills out a term that is expected to end in June. The justices also agreed to take up a case on what constitutes a “true threat” that can be prosecuted as a crime versus what types of threatening language may be protected under the First Amendment.
In that case, a Colorado man, Billy Raymond Counterman, sent a number of message on Facebook to a local singer-songwriter. Some of the messages were laden with profanity and others suggested Counterman had sought the musician out in public.
After the musician secured a protective order in 2016, Counterman was arrested for stalking under a Colorado law that bars “knowingly…repeatedly” making any form of communication with another person that “would cause a reasonable person to suffer serious emotional distress.” The trial court ruled that his messages constituted a “true threat” and therefore didn’t deserve protection under the First Amendment.
Counterman acknowledged that his messages were “annoying” and “weird.” But he argues that, in determining whether he was guilty of stalking, whether he intended the messages to be threatening should have been a consideration. Counterman says he did not intend to threaten the target of his messages.