The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that laws banning workplace discrimination do not apply to many employees of religious organizations. Conservatives are hailing the ruling as a victory for religious freedom. It also appears to undermine one of their arguments against marriage equality and civil rights protections for LGBT Americans.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had sued a Lutheran church in Michigan on behalf of a former teacher, who was fired from a religious school in 2005. The teacher, Cheryl Perich, alleged that the school violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The SCOTUS blog summarized the key issue in the case as follows:
Courts have generally believed that federal employment discrimination statutes do not apply to church employees performing religious functions. The question is whether this ministerial exception applies not simply to religious leaders, but also to teachers at a religious elementary school.
Perich taught mostly secular subjects at the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, but she also taught a religion class and participated in daily prayers. All nine Supreme Court justices agreed that her work fell under the “ministerial exception.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion:
The Roberts opinion dismissed as an “extreme position” the plea of EEOC to limit any “ministerial exception” solely to workers who perform “exclusively religious functions.” While the opinion said the Court was “reluctant to adopt a rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister,” the opinion went on to describe some key factors that courts are to take into account in judging whether a given denomination has proved its claim to the exception. […] The Chief Justice said the Court was unsure whether any church employee would ever do exclusively religious chores. […]
The Roberts opinion, with the support of eight members of the Court overall, said in a final footnote that is likely to take on added significance that the “ministerial exception” was not “a jurisdictional bar” to all such lawsuits claiming workplace bias. Rather, the Chief Justice explained, it is “a defense on the merits.” Thus, such lawsuits can be filed, and the worker who is suing will make a claim that he or she is the victim of discrimination, and then the denomination gets to answer that the case cannot go further because it considers the employee to be a “minister.”
The footnote concluded: “District courts have power to consider [such] claims in cases of this sort, and to decide whether the claim can proceed or is instead barred by the ministerial exception.”
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a separate opinion that civil courts should not decide whether an employee can be considered a “minister”. Rather, Thomas argued that courts should “defer to a religious organization’s good-faith understanding of who qualifies as a minister.”
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan wrote separately to make clear that they did not think the term “minister” was central to courts determining who is covered by the exemption. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists rarely use the title, they wrote.
“Courts should focus on the function performed by persons who work for religious bodies,” Alito wrote.
By focusing narrowly on who counts as a “minister,”
The justices avoided confronting larger questions of religious doctrine raised in the original appeal, such as which religious groups might be constitutionally insulated from any claims. That included whether courts could — in an employment context — compel the ordination of women by the Catholic Church or by an Orthodox Jewish seminary.
This part of the Roberts opinion makes clear that protecting religious groups from government interference trumps anti-discrimination laws:
“The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important,” Roberts wrote. “But so too is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith, and carry out their mission.
“When a minister who has been fired sues her church alleging that her termination was discriminatory, the First Amendment has struck the balance for us.”
Reasonable minds may differ on the right way to balance those concerns, but one fact should be clear to everyone. If anti-discrimination laws do not apply to hiring and firing decisions by religious organizations, conservatives have even less reason to claim that religious groups are in any way threatened by marriage equality or adding sexual orientation language to civil rights statutes. The Iowa Supreme Court already made clear in its Varnum v Brien decision that religious institutions need not recognize same-sex marriages. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has held that almost no one can win an employment discrimination claim against a religious organization.
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