Two footnotes:
I legally changed my name to the one i use at some point. But no one ever hassled me about using it before it was my legal name.
The guy with nightshade allergies is a cisgender man, but his name is one that i think of as being female. (Maybe it’s male in some circles, but the ones i grew up in.) Everyone calls him by that “female” name, and nothing exciting has ever come of that, as far as i know.
(We are intentionally obscuring the distinction between Civil Rights Act accommodation and constitutional rights, but I don’t think it matters for this purpose).
I think that dress codes, grooming standards, and shift-assignment policies absolutely have legitimate job-related justifications. There has been a ton of law written about the employer’s interest (particularly, for example, in a military or paramilitary organization) in having standardized appearance and uniform presentation of personnel – both for unit cohesion and public trust. (I actually find the purpose even more persuasive in, for example, the Abercrombie cases where there company really does have a business interest in its staff presenting a particular “look,” even if it doesn’t implicate public safety).
But even if you question grooming standards, I think we can understand the legitimate employer interest in, for example, a seniority-based shift-selection, in which the junior employee picks last and, in our hypothetical, is left with a number of less desirable weekend shifts. (Or – and something similar has come up in the ADA context – a job-assignment regime, where the desirable jobs are 9-5 and the junior employee gets left with late shifts). (Or, in a more egalitarian world, where everyone needs to work at least one Saturday shift a month in order to distribution the unappealing shifts equitably).
And then we can imagine when the observant Jew or Seventh-Day Adventist can’t work Saturday or after sundown on Friday and needs and accommodation.
I don’t think that can be reduced to the personal whims of an employer.
(And, of course, you describe the school policy here at a very high level of abstraction. The policy at issue is much more specific than “treat students with the same respect” or “do not harass students”. It would be like defining the specific grooming standards as “all employees must look professional” and then, of course, you can fire the Sikh).
As I said before, I think the teacher loses because I don’t think you can accommodate her (I think it probably does present an “undue hardship” for the employer).
Well, not quite. I think she loses because there doesn’t appear to be a way to accommodate her without undermining the policy and disrupting the school’s operations. I do think that dress codes, grooming standards, and shift-assignment policies are “real” and “job-related” (and sometimes “significant”). And while there is a bunch of law on whether or not exempting an employee from a standardized seniority-based shift or job selection regime constitutes an undue burden, we can, at least, understand how an exemption would work.
I don’t know how the accommodation would work in this case. (I had a law professor who announced at the beginning of the class that he had no interest in learning our names or anything about us, but he still needed to call us something when he called on us and read from the class roster, so even that wouldn’t work).
Mine too but these are the things some cases are made of. That one person who wants to push things. As noted up-thread, this is not even the first case of its kind and in that first one the teacher won.
I really think this is a part of an effort of bigots/racists to hide behind religion and be openly bigoted/racist. Every time they win a case like this they move the needle a bit.
This, exactly.
And this.
The District really needs to just fire her ass for being unable to do the job she was hired to do. If she can’t treat students with the basic respect and dignity they deserve, then she is unable to be an effective teacher and should be canned. Her religious objections should carry about as much weight as an Orthodox Jew complaining that the pig slaughterhouse won’t hire them because they demanded that there be no pigs in the facility.
Fuck her and everybody like her.
No. Because the courts don’t look at reasonable standards in regards to employer rules. They look at what’s required by the employer, what accommodation the employee has asked for, and then decide whether the accommodation request was reasonable or not.
Keep in mind that the bar for denying a religious accommodation is a lot lower than it is for an ADA accommodation. If the religious accommodation has a more than de minimis cost or inconvenience to the organization then it can be denied.
Is it? I Wikipedia describes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act this way:
This law reinstated the Sherbert Test, which was set forth by Sherbert v. Verner , and Wisconsin v. Yoder , mandating that strict scrutiny be used when determining whether the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing religious freedom, has been violated. In the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress states in its findings that a religiously neutral law can burden a religion just as much as one that was intended to interfere with religion;,[5] therefore, the Act states that the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.”[6]
The law provided an exception if two conditions are met. First, the burden must be necessary for the “furtherance of a compelling government interest.”[6] Under strict scrutiny, a government interest is compelling when it is more than routine and does more than simply improve government efficiency. A compelling interest relates directly to core constitutional issues.[7] The second condition is that the rule must be the least restrictive way in which to further the government interest. SOURCE
But what if it was? Two rather famous athletes, for instance, have changed their names for religious reasons; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Lew Alcindor, and Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay.
If a teacher refused to address students who’d converted to Islam by their chosen Muslim names, would that be a case of religious discrimination? It seems to me it would be in such a case.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act doesn’t have anything to do with employment law. The Sherbert Test you reference is specifically used in “determining whether the government has violated an individual’s constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion.” If you’re interested, you might want to check out the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s website.
When it comes to religious accommodation, it’s hard to make blanket statements because the correct course of action is dependent on a wide variety of factors. You really have to look at each request on a case-by-case basis. For one employer, it might be totally reasonable to rearrange the schedule of an employee who can’t work on Sundays for religious reasons. For other employers, that might represent a more than de minimis burden that they would not be required to meet.
But most schools, including the one in this case, are governmental entities.
One of Ali’s opponents made the mistake of referring to him by his birth name after he’d converted.
It didn’t end well.
Your own Wiki cite says that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act only applies to the feds and not the states. You can probably find what you’re looking for in another set of laws, but the RFRA isn’t it.
And the population of Ukraine is about a half a percentage of the world population.
It’s not asking for “special” treatment, it’s asking for just the most basic ideas of respect that anyone else is shown.
They aren’t asking for ponies and ice-cream, they are simply asking for their name to be used. It’s not that hard a task that is being asked, for anyone who isn’t a bigot, anyway.
What percent of teachers claim religious reasons to discriminate against their students? If it is less than 1%, can their objections be ignored?
Kansas (where the teacher in the OP is), and at least 20 other states, has its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act in state law.
Mandates courts use the following when considering religious liberty cases:
- Strict scrutiny
- Religious liberty can only be limited for a compelling government interest
- If religious liberty is to be limited, it must be done in the least restrictive manner possible SOURCE
In which case this seems pretty easy. The school (the state), has a compelling interest to provide children with an environment that isn’t psychologically damaging to students.
Not my Wiki cite; Whack-a-Mole’s. I hadn’t read it, just your summary that it applied to the government.
Are you two related? I swear you look so much alike online!
That would be nice, however, there is no law that says that parents can’t be shitty and bigoted against their own children.
At least with school, a child should have a place where they are removed from such toxicity. Schools should be fulfilling the roles that parents refuse to. We can legislated and demand that teachers are not bigoted against students.
Which it has done, and the teacher is taking them to court to force them to change their policy, or at least to make an exception for her based on her religious based bigotry.
Parents being bigots is a problem, and not one that should justify the school or its employees in furthering that bigotry. Parents don’t own their children, and parent’s rights should stop at the point of abuse, which misgendering their own children is a form.
I am willing to bet they will argue that letting kids be transgender is what is harming the kids. I do not think Kansas has any laws protecting gender identity.