(DCWatchdog.com) – A Christian employee has defeated his former employer, the US Postal Service, in a Supreme Court case after the justices ruled unanimously backing his right to religious protection.
The United States Supreme Court agreed that the USPS had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring that the Christian mailman work on Sundays, The National Review reports.
The justices decided workers requesting religious accommodations, for instance, not working on the Sabbath, should be granted such – unless the employer could demonstrate those would cause “substantial increased costs” to the business.
Newsmax points out that even the three progressivists on the bench, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown-Jackson, ruled in favor of the religious accommodation of the Christian worker.
The case, Groff v. DeJoy, 22-174, involves Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who worked as a mailman for the USPS in Pennsylvania.
He didn’t work on Sundays until the service began Sunday deliveries of Amazon packages. Groff transferred to a rural postal station to avoid working on Sundays, but the same service was also introduced there.
Even though the USPS tried to find substitutes for him, that wasn’t always possible, and his objection to working on Sundays meant extra workloads for other employees.
After he missed work to observe the Sabbath, Groff received “progressive discipline.”
In 2019, he quit his job instead of waiting to be fired and filed a lawsuit that argued the USPS didn’t accommodate his religious practice.
Lower courts ruled against him, but the US Supreme Court decided the US Postal Service broke Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“Since its passage, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has made it unlawful for covered employers ‘to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges [of] employment, because of such individual’s… religion,’” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the unanimous ruling, as cited by Breitbart News.
Groff issued a statement thanking the court for hearing his case.
“I hope this decision allows others to be able to maintain their convictions without living in fear of losing their jobs because of what they believe,” he said.
