We suspect that there are tens of millions of Americans who have shared our concern over the inexorable drift towards wokeism that has taken hold in the past few years. Religious freedom has been slowly diminished to the status of an anachronism in an age of moral relativism and cancel culture. Federal, state and local governments established guidelines and monitors to ensure equity rather than equal opportunity for racial minorities – in other words, that minorities are entitled to jobs and higher education slots in predetermined numbers commensurate with their numbers in the population. Equal opportunity was being consigned to the ash heap of history.
We have also witnessed a concerted effort by the Biden Administration to arrogate to itself decision-making power heretofore deemed to be constitutionally in the province of the Congress.
Some rulings by the United States Supreme Court, with its recent Conservative infusion, have begun setting things right.
In a stunning succession in the final days of the Supreme Court’s recent term, which ended last Friday, the Court clarified that the Civil Rights Act provided more statutory protections for religious workers than the lower courts were requiring. It also decided that, notwithstanding anti-discrimination laws, a religious web site designer had a constitutional right to decline to create same-sex wedding websites that would violate her Christian beliefs. Additionally, the Court struck down affirmative action programs in college admissions which had called for preferences for racial minorities, and it ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in federally guaranteed student loans.
We of course are especially pleased with the ruling on the rights of religious workers. Since 1972, federal law has required employers to accommodate an employee’s religious practice unless the employer shows that the worker’s religious practice cannot be “reasonably” accommodated without “undue hardship.” Over the years, however, courts have interpreted “undue hardship” as more than “de minimis.” The result was that countless Sabbath observers were denied an accommodation, even though only a minor adjustment to employment practices or additional cost would have been required of the employer.
Writing for the Court, Justice Samuel Alito concluded “it is enough to say that an employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of it particular business.”
It is particularly noteworthy that the law protecting Sabbath observers was originally drafted and shepherded through the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives by the Jewish community’s own Nat Lewin, widely recognized as one of the leading constitutional lawyers of our time. Over the years he wrote a number of COLPA briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, joined in by major Orthodox organizations, arguing the de minimis standard should be abandoned.
The 1972 religious accommodation law was an historic achievement for observant Jews, and we should all be justly proud.
