Surely in that sort of work, though, being willing to behave as though one accepts the current scientific consensus while on the clock is a BFOQ.
As usual, I don’t understand the decision.
One cannot refuse to hire because the applicant might request a religious exemption to the dress code. Does the company then have to hire her, tell her not to wear the headscarf because it violates the dress code, and then fire her? Would that be [del]kosher[/del] halal?
Regards,
Shodan
PS - ISTM that the major error that A & C made was to put the reason they didn’t hire her into writing. Just say “we found another applicant we liked better” and leave it at that.
Simple: the company has to choose to hire her or not hire her based on factors other than her religion.
They could not fire her for violating the dress code if a reasonable accommodation could be made. Generally, courts have not been very sympathetic to claims that a dress code in a retail establishment is so critical that a woman cannot be permitted to cover her hair for religious reasons without creating an undue burden.
ETA: And your PS is of course true, and applies to every form of illegal discrimination. If you want to be racist, for example, it’s best to keep it quiet.
Well, there is the other way of looking at this: the major error they made was being hostile to the woman’s religious practices for (probably) no good reason.
Well, maybe. But presumably he wasn’t processing patent applications for cold fusion methods. And you can’t fire a biology professor for believing that God created all life in its present form 4,000 years ago, as long as his beliefs don’t interfere with his work.
How do you figure? As an atheist, you have no sincerely held religious beliefs or practices that an employer could possibly infringe upon.
Of course, you have secular beliefs that you feel strongly about, but religious people also have secular beliefs. Those aren’t protected for either group.
It would be like saying that those handicapped people get all of the benefits under the ADA, and a 25 year old healthy person with no disabilities is getting screwed. So to make it fair to everyone, we need to repeal the ADA.
Why should the reason for a belief matter? And why does it only matter if it is described as a “religious belief”? And who keeps track of what is a religious belief? If anyone can claim to have a religion and then claim that their religious belief says X, why does that religious label trump my sincerely held but non-religious belief?
Note that I and a religious person working for the same employer could have the exact same morals and beliefs except that mine would not be tied to a religion. My requests to be excluded from things I believe to be wrong could be denied, while those of the religious person would HAVE to be accommodated. Why?
The whole thing is crazy since I could, at any time, claim that I had joined a religion and that my beliefs were now religious, at which point I would have to accommodated.
From my point of view, the whole thing is utterly arbitrary and ridiculous. You don’t even have to be a good ----ian to qualify for a religious exemption; you just have to claim to be one.
Why should a person who chooses a religion have more rights than someone who chooses no religion?
I disagree with the veracity of your attempt to equivocate. Religions are chosen, a vanishingly small number of handicaps are chosen.
I dont think that’s a problem with the comparison as choice isn’t really an important distinction here. If you get an ADA complaint for not having a wheelchair ramp, it isn’t a defense to point out the complainer intentionally shot themself in the spine.
I’m not 100% sure the comparison is apt, since non-religious moral beliefs deserve as much legal weight as religious moral beliefs, so in the metaphor the non-disabled guy needs a ramp too.
Hmm, actually, I’m not sure we’d actually want to force people to build ramps if handicapped people all choose to be wheelchair bound, so maybe choice is a relevant distinction. I’d’ve just deleted my last post, but missed the edit window
Similarly, black people couldn’t marry white people or ride in the white train car, and white people also couldn’t marry black people or ride in the black train car, so miscegenation and integration weren’t protected for either group.
And gay people are free to marry people of the opposite sex, just like straight people are, so marrying someone of the same sex isn’t protected for either group.
Equality!
IIRC jtgain actually believes the second argument.
So, is my understanding correct that in theory, A’s closely-held vegetarianism because he is a Hindu and B’s closely-held vegetarianism because he does not feel people should eat animals but is an atheist are both protected under law but in practice only A has won cases?
One reason is that the First Amendment carves out a special place for religion: as a matter of constitutional dimension, the government cannot establish a religion or impede the practice of a religion.
There’s no such exception for non-religious practice. The government is free to establish non-religious practice and free to impede non-religious practices (within whatever other boundaries might exist, of course).
Pretty much.
ETA: that was in response to ZSofia’s question.
What law protects B’s closely-held vegetarianism because he, for non-religious reasons, does not feel people should eat animals?
Duh.
Note that your post does nothing to answer the underlying question and merely states, in effect, that things are the way they are because that’s the way they are.
Your post offers no argument in support of elevating religious beliefs over any other sincerely held beliefs, which is what my question asked.
Title VII, according to the EEOC. Obviously, there is more nuance to it than that since the EEOC interpretation requires some additional findings, but broadly speaking hers is a reasonable lay precis.
It’s weird; we don’t really know because if you don’t win a case, what’s the measurement for whether you’re protected, right?
Employers have to make reasonable accommodations for vegetarianism as an employee’s sincerely-held Hindu practice.
If an atheist employee is vegetarian, the EEOC says that the question is whether it’s a “moral or ethical belief as to what is right and wrong” that is “sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views,” and they say that if it is, it is also entitled to reasonable accommodation. Which so far doesn’t sound, to me, like that high a bar; I know vegetarians whose vegetarianism is about what’s right and wrong and is much more devout than a lot of people’s traditional religious beliefs. But then it starts to get diluted, and there start to be qualifications and exceptions about what kind of belief it has to be, for reasons that aren’t easy to follow on paper but which are easy to follow when you understand that really, the underlying theme here, dating back hundreds of years, is that believing in God (really the God, but we don’t say that) is important and special in American jurisprudence.
So what you end up with is this notion in general that you can have non-religious beliefs that are protected, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen one.
I’m asking because I don’t know, and not to suggest that I’m contradicting your claim (or the EEOC). Has the EEOC’s defense of such a reading been upheld by a court?
No. There was a discussion of its treatment towards the end of the previous page. They all quote it with approval, or at least without evident disapproval, but there are no reported cases involving the sort of beliefs at issue here (other than one California case where the court discussed a vegan’s state-law claims under a slightly less accommodating statute.)