Actually I think you can - provided you can provide copious amount of “proof” that you just really don’t want to kill people (which in practice is to say, religion, because that’s the only valid reason not to want to kill people, as you know. The Good Lord help you if you’re a conscientious objector for atheist reasons).
In which case they might just make you a supply truck driver, or a cook, or a medic, or a radar operator or any and all other military professions that facilitate and enable the shooting of people. Clean hands (if you don’t think about it too much), motherfucker !
But once again, unlike the clerk that would like to issue licenses to everyone until a same-sex couple comes along, step aside, then continue on doing the same job, the soldier doesn’t have that option. “I’m just going to go through basic and march with you guys, but I’ll need you to cover for me when the shooting starts, o.k.?”-not gonna work.
Did I miss the part where these clerks were drafted into their jobs? Conscientious objectors are not allowed to voluntarily enlist in the military, and if they become COs during their service they are not allowed to re-up and may even try and get a legal discharge.
Or being a clerk in an office. Or a cook. Or a doctor. Or an aircraft mechanic. Or a battlefield medicawarded a Congressional Medal of Honor.
There is a LOT more to being a soldier than firing weapons. In our modern military there may be more non-combat roles than there are people shooting people.
So to bring this back to clerks at a county office… I’ll cite the EEOC
A lot depends on the size of the office and number of employees. Religious accommodation may be required where it possible to do so without causing more than a minimal burden.
So if there are ten clerks and one objects to issuing SSM licenses then perhaps the objector must be assigned other work. And if there are enough vehicle tax payments to process, property tax to collect, hunting licenses to issue and so forth and the job reassignment is not more than a minimal burden on the employer then the accommodation is required.
But if there is only one clerk in a small county then such accommodation may not be possible without causing a significant burden. In such a case no accommodation may be required.
Bigoted or not. Like it or not. Religious views get accommodations that many would not like to give. See Burwell v Hobby Lobby and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
While Dopers might like the idea of tossing anyone who doesn’t toe the employer’s line, religious discrimination is a serious thing.
In Peterson v. Wilmur Communications a private sector “[e]mployee [was] entitled to summary judgment on religious discrimination when he was demoted after he publicly announced he held a white supremacist religious belief system and he supervised minority employees.” Cite I’d call that religious bigotry on the part of the employee that was protected by the court.
But being a government worker may get you stronger protection for religious expression, not a purge of religious expression from the workplace.
The EEOC notes that public sector workers are protected by both Title VII and the First Amendment with regards to religious expression unlike the private sector worker who has to rely on only Title VII. CiteSee item 17.
There are a whole series of cases involving public sector workers alleging religious discrimination. Several involved a government employee not being permitted to wear religiously significant jewelry or head-wear. The Justice Department has a webpage describing such cases. In several cases the government agency entered a consent decree to reverse its action.
The case perhaps closest on point to the current issue with clerks issuing marriage licenses is from United States v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (at same link above) sabbath observing Jews and Christians objected to the MTA’s policy of refusing to accept applications from anyone not stating availability to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Applicants who wished to observe a sabbath by not working one day per week objected.
This was a situation of a potential employee refusing to work a particular day of the week, somewhat analogous to a clerk willing to work to issue most licenses, but not work to issue a subset of licenses, based upon religious grounds. The MTA entered into a consent decree " to accept the applications of Sabbath-observant applicants; provide applicants with information about their accommodation rights; permit drivers to swap assignments with other drivers, and when no acceptable assignment is possible either through use of seniority rights or swaps, permit drivers to take temporary leaves of absence; and provide information about religious accommodation in marketing literature and in its training programs for supervisors."
**bolding **is my emphasis
The whole point of the conscientious objector is that you can’t just quit from the military. That is not true of these clerks. If I have moral objections to killing people, I am still legally required to show up if drafted. If I develop these objections after enlisting in the military, I can not just leave. I have to serve my term or face potential legal consequences up to death.
Because of this, the concept of COs was established to prevent compelling someone by threat of death from violating their conscience. There is no threat of death or even fines in this case. They can walk away at any time with no other consequence then no longer having the position whose duties you find morally repugnant.
Clerks providing licenses for marriage don’t fall under a religious exception as the government contract called marriage has nothing to do with marriage as defined by religion. They don’t get the same rights or responsibilities.
A religious marriage, in and of itself, does not grant the rights of a civil marriage. Up until very recently there were religions who were more than happy to marry two same sex individuals. Those marriages were not eligible for the rights and responsibilities granted to those who were able to partake of a civil marriage.
A civil marriage is not automatically recognized by different religions. For example, I understand that a person cannot get remarried in a Catholic church without receiving an annulment for their previous marriage. Not so of civil marriage. A person can get a civil divorce from their spouse and be free to remarry in a civil marriage. Not being religious myself I have not paid much attention but I’m sure that similar rules can be found for different religions. I know that my grandmother in law, a very religious person apparently, skipped out on our civil marriage ceremony (performed by a lawyer with the bare essential oaths that there was no legal impediment to our marriage) and does not consider us married.
To equate the civil marriage offered by government is to, IMHO, commit the fallacy of equivocation. The two do carry the same name but they are two completely different things with the civil ceremony having nothing to do with whatever religious covenant that a person is trying to protect.
I’m failing to see the analogy here. Could a a bus driver who opposes gay marriage refuse to drive for a gay married couple? Does he tell them to wait for the next bus, or say “sorry folks, it’s my break time” and make everyone wait until they send out another bus driver? These are the kind of alternatives people are proposing WRT issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.
Or is it the shift aspect that’s important here? Should an office say “we only issue licenses to gay couples on Tuesdays” and give all employees with “religious objections” that day off?
Whether there is an equivalence between civil marriage and religious marriage in the eyes of the complaining party is not the point. Much like in the Hobby Lobby case, it is whether the party seeking the religious accommodation has a sincerely held religious belief. Courts are loathe to delve too deeply into whether a particular belief is sincerely held. Courts have done so, but try to avoid it.
Courts have recognized that *de minimis * (too trivial to be significant) accommodations much be granted for religious accommodations under Title VII of the Civil Right Act. If the accommodation requested is not de minimis then the employer need not grant it.
The question about a bus driver objecting to driving a married gay couple would face whether there is a minimally burdensome (to the employer) alternative. If not, no accommodation need be granted. Likely making the bus pull over and wait for a substitute driver would not be a de minimis accommodation.
However an Orthodox Jewish bus driver who objected to working on his Sabbath for religious reasons could trade shifts with a similarly qualified driver (appropriately licensed, knows the route, etc…) and that would be a de minimis accommodation which must be granted.
A clerk who requests religious accommodation so as not to issue a marriage license to a same sex couple would need to show that there is a de minimis accommodation available. Making the couple wait until next Tuesday might not be acceptable. Asking to be assigned to other duties *might * be acceptable, depending upon work needs of the employer and perhaps number of employees requesting accommodation. Asking the couple to wait a moment while another employee steps to the counter to handle their license might be de minimis, depending in part on how long of a delay is involved.
This the the part that I truly don’t understand- it seems that there are some people who are against any religious accommodations for any reason regardless of whether the accommodation causes any real inconvenience to anyone. It’s almost as if the bakery took the wedding cake order from the same-sex couple and provided the cake, but people complained because Bob objected to baking the cake and so Tom baked it instead.
I suppose there might be some places where there is a single county/city/town/village clerk who does everything from issuing marriage licenses to issuing permits for block parties to processing passport applications, and if that's the case, that person simply cannot be accommodated. But many (probably most) places are going to have multiple employees in the clerk's office, so that it's *possible* to assign employee A to handle marriage licenses and block party permits while employee B handles passport applications, garage sale permits and dog licenses. Other places are so populous that there may be entire offices that perform nothing but marriage-related tasks - but even there, it's *possible* that a particular employee can be accommodated by assigning him or her to responding to requests for records or by allowing him or her to hand the documents to another clerk for processing which would take an extra couple of minutes , not days or months or weeks. And of course, even in those situations accommodations will not always be possible. But sometimes they are.
I can certainly imagine that the small office where one clerk wears many hats could not readily offer accommodation if the sole employee asked not to process same-sex marriage licenses. In such a case, that request would be denied.
And, perhaps to the liking of more liberal Dopers, a deeply religious county where all the clerks request accommodation may find that there is not a de minimis solution, and thus the accommodation need not be granted.
It’s the larger offices with several employees where few employees request accommodation that an accommodation is more likely to be de minimis.
If there is not a de minimis solution then the religious accommodation need not be granted. But where there is a de minimis solution, the “my way or the highway” attitude will end up in an employer being sued and losing.
It’s funny. I’ve heard so many people argue that anti-miscegenation was never about religion, even though it used to be (at least to some extent). I’m guessing to some extent that link was broken when people figured it was really really bad to be seen as a racist.
Same way- he can request to be assigned to handling passport applications, garage sale permits and dog licenses and not handle marriage licenses , or he can request to be assigned to responding to requests for records or he can request to be allowed to have the clerk next to him process that application while he ducks out for a bathroom break. And if none of those things are possible - he’s the only employee or so many people want accommodations that the workload won’t allow it , or the workload won’t allow it for other reasons (90% of the work is issuing marriage licenses and he would be passing too many on to the next clerk) then he either issues the licenses or quits or gets fired.
There’s a difference between insisting that the license be issued under substantially the same conditions as other marriage licenses (no waiting for the second Tuesday of the month or even until tomorrow unless everyone has to do so) and insisting that a particular person must issue the license even if the workload and staffing are such that he can be assigned to perform duties that don’t include issuing marriage licenses.
There was, however, within the past few years, an incident of a Justice of the Peace (IIRC; otherwise it might have been a wedding chapel operator) who declined to officiate an interracial civil ceremony. He insisted he wasn’t racist, too.
Here it is. Turns out he also refused to process license applications. Notably, he did NOT cite religious belief as underlying his policy; and he DID resign his position rather than change that policy.
They are told that their license request is too offensive to be processed, and another, less “Christian” person will have to do it.
Yes, they get their license, and in short order. The folks at the back of the bus got to their destination as quickly as those in the front of the bus, too.
The Employer. The accommodation is made from the employer to the employee, not from the customer to the employee.
Point is that the harm isn’t done to the employer, it’s done to the customer. The customer should not have to be informed that their legally requested license offends the Clerk, and they will need another Clerk to process their document.