The Supreme Court is poised to correct an old error that has hurt religious workers for decades by depriving them of their civil rights. More than 50 years ago, Congress protected religious employees in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It requires employers to give their employees reasonable accommodations for religious practices unless it would cause an “undue hardship” on the business. Like the rest of the Civil Rights Act, Congress’s aim in Title VII was to root out discrimination in American public life, especially against minority groups. Similar reasonable accommodation provisions protect workers who need them for other reasons, like disability or pregnancy. But the Supreme Court got the religious part of the law — and only the religious part — entirely wrong. In its 1977 ruling in TWA v. Hardison, the court said employers could satisfy the “undue hardship” standard — and thereby get out of accommodating their religious employees — any time they could show even a slight burden on the company. As Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan observed at the time, this was a “fatal blow” to Congress’s effort to protect religious workers. It was preposterous, too: “Simple English usage” should have stopped […]
