Unanimous ruling declares employers must show ‘undue hardship’
By Bob Unruh
In a stunning result announced Thursday, even the far-left trio on the U.S. Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson, joined with the conservative majority in affirming the religious rights of a postal worker who ended up resigning because he was being forced to work on Sundays, in violation of his faith.
The case involved Gerald Groff, who worked in a position that did not involve any duties for him on Sundays.
However, his employer then accepted a contract to deliver for Amazon that did require Sunday work, so Groff transferred to a location that still remained closed on Sundays.
Then that location took on Sunday work and his bosses insisted he take a rotation of working on Sundays, in violation of his faith. He ended up resigning but sued for the violation of his religious rights.
The unanimous decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, found that, “Title VII requires that an employer ‘reasonably accommodate’ an employee’s practice of religion, not merely that it assesses the reasonableness of a particular possible accommodation or accommodations.
