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A flurry of recent appellate court decisions have changed the landscape of worker protections under federal workplace discrimination laws. This has raised questions for employers who may look to religious protections to defend their hiring and firing decisions.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was designed to put an end to the “Mad Men” days of demeaning and discriminatory treatment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and sex. Interpretations of the law’s protections against sex discrimination have expanded to cover more individuals within the LGBT community.
“The law is finally beginning to catch up with the people,” Gauri Punjabi, an employment attorney in Boston, told Bloomberg Law.
But what will the recent rulings from several federal appeals courts mean for the religious protections afforded to corporations under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?
“The decisions might create new potential conflicts for religious organizations,” Luke Goodrich, attorney at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told Bloomberg Law. “But RFRA is rarely used as a defense in Title VII cases.” Any concerns about a push by religious organizations against Title VII are overblown, he said.
A RFRA defense would only apply to an instance where the government or one of its agencies infringed on the religious protections afforded by the Act. As a federal law, Title VII provides protections when either a private actor or a state agency violates its inherent protections.
RFRA has been around since 1993. It perhaps saw its brightest day with the Hobby Lobby case in 2014, when the crafts store argued that being forced to implement the contraception component of the Affordable Care Act would violate its sincerely held religious beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, setting a landmark precedent that not only ascribed religious belief to a closely held corporation, but constitutional protections that come with it.
Fast forward to 2018 where the Second and Seventh Circuit Courts of Appeal have said that Title VII anti-bias provisions cover sexual orientation, and both the Sixth Circuit and the federal agency charged with enforcing workplace anti-discrimination laws have broadened the act’s protections to include transgender identity. The myriad of rulings […]