Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the right of an employee to be granted a religious accommodation by his employer unless doing so would substantially affect the employer’s business. In Groff v. DeJoy , the high court reiterated that employees must not be forced to choose between their faith and their job, and finally clarified long-standing precedent that had been largely misunderstood and used to deny religious accommodations to employees for years. The petitioner in the case, Gerald Groff, had asked the justices to determine whether his employer, the U.S. Postal Service, was required to provide a religious accommodation excusing him from work so that he could observe the Sabbath on Sundays. Groff argued that he must , as Exodus 20:8 puts it, “[r]emember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” When the Postal Service began delivering packages Sundays for Amazon, it initially accommodated Groff by exempting him from deliveries that day so that he could observe the Sabbath. But a few years later, the Postal Service […]
