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Posts Tagged ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’

Federal Court Rules That Charlotte (N.C.) Catholic High School Violated Title VII by Discharging Gay Substitute Teacher 

Posted on: September 6th, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

In 2014, after federal courts ruled that North Carolina had to allow same-sex couples to marry, Lonnie Billard and his long-time partner Richard Donham decided to marry and Billard posted an exuberant announcement on his Facebook page for his friends only.  He ended that announcement by stating, “If you don’t agree with this. . . keep it to yourself.  You never asked my opinion about your personal life and I am not asking yours.”

Among Billard’s Facebook friends were staff and parents associated with Charlotte Catholic High School, where he had taught as a substitute English teacher since 2012, after a decade as a full-time member of the faculty teaching English and Drama.  His friends did not keep the news to themselves, and the school stopped calling Billard as a substitute.  When he asked why, he was told by the assistant principal that it was because he “announced his intention to marry a person of the same sex.”

Billard had been a very successful teacher at Charlotte Catholic.  He won the Inspirational Educator Award from North Carolina State University in 2011 and the Charlotte Catholic Teacher of the Year Award in 2012.  He had been nominated for that award “every year since its inception,” according to the man who was principal of the school at that time.  He had been associated with the school since 2000, and throughout that time he had been in a “romantic relationship” with Donham, whom he listed on Charlotte Catholic employee contact forms as his “friend” or “housemate,” and who was identified on some forms as living at the same address as Billard.  Donham came to Charlotte Catholic events with Billard, accompanying him on class trips to New York City with the drama students to see musicals, and had even served as a substitute teacher when Billard was teaching English full-time.  Donham also substituted at the Charlotte Diocese’s middle school.  Billard claimed that members of the high school’s administration knew that he was gay, but the current principal and assistant principal both claimed, rather incredibly, that they were not aware of his sexual orientation until his Facebook post in December 2014.

The Catholic Church is outspokenly opposed to same-sex marriage, and Catholic schools, which have employed many lesbians and gay men as teachers, have consistently dismissed those employees, regardless of how they have performed their jobs, upon finding out that they intended to or had married same-sex partners.  The de facto position of the Church sounds like the federal government’s old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay military service.  They were happy to employ qualified gay people as ministers (especially church musicians) and teachers, so long as the employees were quiet about being gay and did not go public on same-sex marriages, which the Church saw as defying Catholic doctrine and setting a bad example for congregants and students.

Billard filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May 2015, claiming a violation of his rights under Title VII, but at that time the EEOC had not yet issued its ruling that it would investigate and prosecute sexual orientation claims under Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex.  Ironically, the EEOC issued such a decision, in the case of gay air traffic controller David Baldwin, in July 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2015 in the Obergefell case that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.  Billard’s charge was still pending with the EEOC at that time, but perhaps the school’s religious defenses discouraged the EEOC from pursuing Billard’s case directly, as it decided not to sue Charlotte Catholic High School on his behalf, instead issuing a “Notice of Right to Sue Letter” to him in November 2016.  He obtained representation from the ACLU Foundation and its North Carolina affiliate, which filed suit against the school in January 2017.   On September 3, 2021, U.S. District Judge Max O. Cogburn, Jr., of the federal district court in Charlotte, granted summary judgment to Billard and denied summary judgment to the school, finding that Billard had proven a clear violation of Title VII and that none of the defenses argued by the school were valid.

The school argued that it had not fired Billard because is gay, but rather because he supports gay marriage, which the Catholic Church opposes.  The school argued that under the First Amendment’s protection for free exercise of religion, it is privileged to discharge teachers who disagree with the Church’s positions.  The school also argued that it was protected from liability by two sections of Title XII that relieve religious institutions, including religious schools, from complying with the statute’s ban on discrimination because of religion.  The school also cited a “church autonomy doctrine” under the First Amendment, which prohibits “excessive government intrusion upon religion” and which includes the so-called “ministerial exception” that the Supreme Court has identified as sheltering religious institutions from any liability for their employment decisions regarding ministers.  The school also cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing that this federal statute would prevent the court from holding it liable for discrimination under Title VII.

The school actually disclaimed any contention that Billard comes within the ministerial exception, but to be on the safe side, Judge Cogburn explained why Billard’s duties as a substitute teacher did not come within the scope of that exception, as most recently described by the Supreme Court last year in a Catholic schoolteacher case, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru.  Despite the Supreme Court’s broad definition of the exception to extend to any religious school teacher who performed any religious functions, the judge concluded that Billard’s charge to lead a prayer at the beginning of each class was too minimal to excuse the School from complying with Title VII in his case.  He was not hired to teach religion.

Judge Cogburn rejected the school’s argument that discharging somebody for announcing his plans to marry a same sex partner was not discriminating against him because of his sex (or sexual orientation), drawing a comparison to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s reasoning in the Bostock decision of 2020.  The judge pointed out that a female teacher who posted an announcement on Facebook that she was marrying a man would not be discharged, but when Billard, a man, posted the announcement that he was marrying a man, he was discharged, so clearly his sex was a reason for his discharge.  Justice Gorsuch had described similar hypothetical situations in explaining the Supreme Court’s conclusion that firing an employee for being gay was inescapably due, in part, to the employee’s sex, and thus prohibited by Title VII, even though members of Congress in 1964 would not have expected such a ruling.  Gorsuch, a “textualist,” takes the view that the words of the statute take priority over the expectation or intentions of the legislators who passed it, and his view won the support of six of the Court’s nine members.

As to the express religious institution exemptions included in Title VII, the court concluded that they were not intended to excuse religions institutions from complying with Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex. Rather, they were enacted to allow religious institutions to prefer members of their faith in making employment decisions.  Billard is a Catholic, and the court was unwilling to accept the school’s argument that a provision allowing it to discriminate because of religion also gave it a right to discriminate because of sex if it had a religious reason for doing so.  Under that theory, a religious institution would be free to discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or sex, the other categories prohibited under Title VII, which stretches the religious exception too far and would expose thousands of employees of religious institutions to discriminatory treatment.  Congress has not given religious institutions free reign to discriminate against employees for reasons other than the employees’ religion.

As to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, many federal appeals courts have ruled that it applies only to situations where the government is suing to enforce a federal statute against a religious defendant, but not to lawsuits brought by private individuals.  Although the Supreme Court has yet to rule on this question, and at least one appeals court has disagreed with that conclusion, Judge Cogburn found based on a close reading of the text of RFRA that it was clearly aimed to restricting enforcement actions by the government, and that a court decision in a lawsuit brought by a non-governmental litigant, such as Lonnie Billard, would not be subject to RFRA’s requirement that the government prove it had a compelling interest to enforce a federal law that burdens the defendant’s free exercise of religion. The court itself is not a “party” to a non-governmental lawsuit, and in the absence of a governmental party, the affirmative defense provisions of RFRA have no application.

Several lawsuits are pending around the country in which employees of Catholic institutions who were discharged over the same-sex marriage issue are seeking relief under Title VII.  In many of them, the plaintiffs’ job duties were such as to bring them within the ministerial exception.  Billard’s is the rare case that was not, at least according to Judge Cogburn’s analysis.

Having granted Billard summary judgment on the merits of his claim, Judge Cogburn ordered that the case “Proceed to trial to determine the appropriate relief that should be granted.”  It is likely that to avoid a court order to reinstate Billard as a substitute teacher, the school may offer a substantial financial settlement.  Title VII specifically lists “reinstatement” as a remedy for a wrongful discharge.  If the case doesn’t settle and Judge Cogburn orders reinstatement, the school and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, a co-defendant, are likely to appeal to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Cogburn was appointed to the court by President Barack Obama.  In 2014, he wrote the decision striking down North Carolina’s ban on same-sex marriage, a decision that was upheld by the 4th Circuit and denied review by the Supreme Court, and it was the decision that led Billard and Donham to decide to get married that led to this lawsuit!

Federal Court Enjoins HHS & EEOC From Requiring Catholic Plaintiffs to Perform or Provide Gender Transition Services

Posted on: January 23rd, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

Ruling on the last full day of the Trump Administration, one of the federal trial judges appointed by the outgoing president ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bars the federal government from enforcing the non-discrimination requirement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Section 1557 or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against Catholic plaintiffs to require them either to fund or perform gender transition procedures.  Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Azar, 2021 WL 191009, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9156 (D.N.D., January 19, 2021).  Chief Judge Peter D. Welte denied summary judgment to co-plaintiff the State of North Dakota, which sought a declaration that it is not required to provide such procedures in its state health institutions or to its employees or through its Medicaid program, and found that the Plaintiffs lacked standing on their claims concerning performance of abortions and sterilizations, as the court found that various provisions of the ACA and other federal laws already relieved them of obligations in that regard.

Judge Welte issued his opinion just a few days after hearing oral argument on the summary judgment motions, but the case has been pending for a long time and it is likely that he had most of the lengthy, analytical opinion drafted well in advance of the argument, on the basis of the suit papers.

The case was complicated by the history of the federal government’s positions on the issue in question, which changed to the extent of the Trump Administration withdrawing an Obama Administration regulation from  2016 and replacing it with a new regulation, formally announced just days before the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision.  In Bostock, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (June 15, 2020), the Court determined that Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex necessarily extended to claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation and transgender status.

The final regulation announced days before Bostock acknowledged that the case had been argued and indicated that its outcome could affect the scope of the ACA’s non-discrimination requirement.  In its explanatory Prologue to the regulation, HHS reiterated the Trump Administration’s view – presented to the Court in Bostock by the Solicitor General – that discrimination because of sex does not encompass discrimination because of gender identity.  Confident that they were going to win, their new regulation, intended to supplant the Obama Administration’s regulation, removed the earlier regulation’s definition of “sex” so that it no longer specified “gender identity.”  They went ahead and officially published the new regulation as previously schedule in the Federal Register a few days after Bostock was decided, making no effort to delay publication in order to take account of that decision.  The result was peculiar: a regulation formally published just days after a Supreme Court decision that admittedly could affect the substance of the regulation, but utterly failing to grapple with that effect.

The Trump Administration’s brazen decision to go ahead with final publication without taking Bostock into account persuaded several other federal district courts to conclude that the final regulation’s definition of sex violated the Administrative Procedure Act as being inconsistent with the ACA statute’s non-discrimination requirement and/or because it was adopted arbitrarily by failing to consider the Bostock decision.  Other district courts have also criticized HHS’s assertion in the regulation that Title IX’s religious entity exemption was relevant to the ACA, inasmuch as the ACA’s non-discrimination provision specifies that entities covered by it were subject to the kinds of discrimination prohibited by Title IX, which exempts religious schools from its sex discrimination requirements.  The Trump Administration had also persisted in rejecting arguments that Bostock’s interpretation of Title VII necessarily applied to Title IX and other federal sex discrimination laws.

The day after Judge Welte issued his decision, President Biden included among his first Executive Orders one instructing the Executive Branch to apply Bostock to all federal sex discrimination laws.  While EO’s are not interpretively binding on the courts, they are binding on how Executive Branch agencies interpret and enforce their statutory mandates, so the new leadership in HHS and, eventually, the EEOC (where the president gets to appoint one new member of the Commission each year, relatively quickly tipping the balance to the new Administration’s viewpoint regarding the definition of sex discrimination.

But that is neither here nor there regarding the central question in this case, at least as framed by Judge Welte in response to the Catholic plaintiffs, which is whether the government is precluded from enforcing any such non-discrimination requirement against the plaintiffs according to their religiously-based objections, in light of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In Bostock, Justice Neil Gorsuch referred to RFRA as a “super statute” that may override non-discrimination requirements of Title VII (and by extension Title VII and the ACA) in an “appropriate case.”  Is this such an appropriate case?  That turns on whether application of the non-discrimination requirement imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion by the Catholic plaintiffs, in which case Judge Welte characterizes the level of judicial review to be applied to the government’s policy as “strict scrutiny” such that the policy can only be applied if it is the least intrusive way to achieve a compelling government interest.

The court found that “compliance with the challenged laws would violate the Catholic Plaintiffs’ religious beliefs as they sincerely understand them. . .  In meticulous detail, the Catholic Plaintiffs have explained that their religious beliefs regarding human sexuality and procreation prevent them from facilitating gender transitions through either medical services or insurance coverage.”

As to the compelling interest test, the court found that the Defendants “never attempt to make that showing here.”  Of course, Defendants are the Trump Administration’s HHS (for the ACA) and EEOC (for Title VII).  The rule HHS published in June 2020 “conceded to lacking a ‘compelling interest in forcing the provision, or coverage, of these medically controversial [gender-transition] services by covered entities.’”  By contrast, of course, when the Obama Administration opined on this in 2016, HHS specified a compelling interest in ensuring nondiscriminatory access to healthcare, and the EEOC asserted a compelling interest in ensuring non-discriminatory employee benefits plans.  But Judge Welte noted Supreme Court authority that those interests are stated at too high a level of generality to meet the RFRA test, directing courts to “scrutinize the asserted harm of granting specific exemptions to particular religious claimants and to look to the marginal interest in enforcing the challenged government action in that particular context.”  Responding to this command, wrote Welte, “Neither HHS nor the EEOC has articulated how granting specific exemptions for the Catholic Plaintiffs will harm the asserted interests in preventing discrimination. . .  In short, the Court harbors serious doubts that a compelling interest exists.  This issue need not be resolved, however,” he continued, “because the Defendants fail to meet the rigors of the least-restrictive-means test.”

The “least-restrictive means” test is the third part of the RFRA analysis.  Even if the government’s interest is compelling, the question is whether there is a way to achieve that interest without burdening the free exercise rights of the plaintiffs.  Is requiring Catholic entities to perform or finance gender transition the “only feasible means to achieve its compelling interest,” asks the court.  Here, resorting to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby case, Welte suggests that “the most straightforward way of doing this would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing gender transition procedures for those unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.” And, he opined, “if broadening access to gender-transition procedures themselves is the goal, then ‘the government could assist transgender individuals in finding and paying for transition procedures available from the growing number of healthcare providers who offer and specialize in those services,’”  quoting Franciscan Alliance, a decision from the Northern District of Texas that had preliminarily enjoined the government from bringing enforcement actions under Section 1557 against religious objectors.  (That injunction was dissolved when the Trump Administration indicated to that court that it did not intend to enforce Section 1557 against religious objectors and would replace the 2016 Obama Administration regulation with one that did not require such coverage.) And, said the court, the Defendants had not shown that “these alternatives are infeasible.”

Thus, the court granted summary judgment and issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of Sec. 1557 or Title VII against the Catholic Plaintiffs in this case.  The court did not issue a nationwide injunction, however, limiting its injunction to the plaintiff organizations in this case, and as noted finding that the state of North Dakota did not have standing on these questions, rejecting its Spending Clause argument that the government was wrongly coercing the state to fund gender transition through the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

It is worth noting that this litigation was not brought on by an actual case of a transgender individual seeking gender transition services from a Catholic health care organization, or the employee of a Catholic entity challenging the failure of the employer’s health insurance to cover the procedures, or in response to a challenge to the state’s failure to cover these procedures for its employees or Medicaid participants.  This was affirmative litigation brought by the state and the Catholic plaintiffs preemptively, seeking to establish judicial cover for their discriminatory policies.  As such, and significantly, the interests of transgender people were not directly represented in this case although the ACLU participated as amicus curiae.   (Curiously, the Westlaw report of the case did not list the ACLU among counsel, but the Lexis report did as of January 23 when this account was written.)  The Plaintiffs were represented by the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and private counsel for several of the Catholic institutional plaintiffs.  The government (i.e., the Trump Administration) was represented by the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for North Dakota, which of course was happy to let the Plaintiffs win in light of the Administration’s position opposing the Bostock ruling and their issuance of the 2020 Regulation (which the court could plausibly have found mooted the case, were it not for the fact that he was ruling the day before President Biden was to be inaugurated).  Now it is up to the Biden Administration to take over and appeal this decision to the 8th Circuit, in light of the President’s January 20 Executive Order.

Federal Appeals Court Rules for Transgender Funeral Director in Title VII Discrimination Suit

Posted on: March 11th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled on March 7 in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., 2018 WL 1177669, 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 5720, that a Michigan funeral home violated federal anti-discrimination law by terminating a funeral director who announced that she would be transitioning during her summer vacation and would return to work as a woman.  The 6th Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over federal cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Rejecting a ruling by U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox that the funeral home’s action was protected by the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the court that the government’s “compelling interest” to eradicate employment discrimination because of sex took priority over the religious beliefs of the funeral home’s owner.

This is the first time that any federal appeals court has ruled that RFRA would not shelter an employer from a gender identity discrimination claim by a transgender plaintiff.  Although the 6th Circuit has allowed Title VII claims by transgender plaintiffs in the past under a “gender stereotype” theory, this is also the first time that the 6th Circuit has explicitly endorsed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s conclusion that gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, directly prohibited by Title VII.  Judge Moore drew a direct comparison to a Title VII decision by the 7th Circuit in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 853 F.3d 339 (7th Cir. 2017), which held similarly that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, thus potentially joining in the widening split of federal appellate courts over a broad construction of Title VII to extend to both kinds of claims.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s involvement as volunteer counsel for the funeral home makes it highly likely that the Supreme Court will be asked to review this ruling.

The lawsuit was filed by the EEOC, which sued after investigating Aimee Stephens’ administrative charge that she had been unlawfully terminated by the Michigan funeral home.  After the district court ruled in favor of the funeral home, the EEOC appealed to the 6th Circuit and Stephens, represented by the ACLU, was granted standing to intervene as co-plaintiff in the appeal.

“While living and presenting as a man,” wrote Judge Moore, “she worked as a funeral director at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., a closely held for-profit corporation that operates three funeral homes in Michigan.  Stephens was terminated from the Funeral Home by its owner and operator, Thomas Rost, shortly after Stephens informed Rost that she intended to transition from male to female and would represent herself and dress as a woman while at work.”

Rost identifies himself as a Christian who espouses the religious belief that “the Bible teaches that a person’s sex is an immutable God-given gift,” and that he would be “violating God’s commands if he were to permit one of the Funeral Home’s funeral directors to deny their sex while acting as a representative of the organization” or if he were to “permit one of the Funeral Home’s male funeral directors to wear the uniform for female funeral directors while at work.”

“In particular,” related Judge Moore, “Rost believes that authorizing or paying for a male funeral director to wear the uniform for female funeral directors would render him complicit ‘in supporting the idea that sex is a changeable social construct rather than an immutable God-given gift.’”

As such, Rost claimed that his company’s obligation to comply with Title VII should be excused in this case because of the later-enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which provides that the federal government may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion unless it has a compelling justification for doing so, and that the rule the government seeks to apply is narrowly tailored to burden religious practice no more than is necessary to achieve the government’s goal.

The funeral home moved to dismiss the case, arguing that Title VII does not ban discrimination against a person because they are transgender or transitioning, that the funeral home could reasonably require compliance with its dress code, and that requiring the funeral home to allow a “man dressed as a woman” to serve as a funeral director would substantially burden the funeral home’s free exercise of religion, as defined by Rost, and violate its rights under RFRA.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, there was no Supreme Court authority for the proposition that a funeral home, or any other for-profit business, could claim to “exercise religion,” but in that case the Court ruled that because business corporations are defined as “persons” in the U.S. Code, they enjoy the same protection as natural persons under RFRA.  At least in the case of a closely-held corporation such as Hobby Lobby, with a small group of shareholders who held the same religious beliefs on the issue in question – a federal regulation requiring that employer health plans cover various forms of contraception to which Hobby Lobby’s owners took exception on religious grounds – the corporation was entitled to protection under RFRA based on the religious views of its owners.  The Harris Funeral Home is analogous to Hobby Lobby Stores, albeit operating on a smaller scale, so Rost’s religious views on gender identity and transitioning can be attributed to the corporation for purposes of RFRA.

Interestingly, this would not have been an issue in the case had Stephens brought the lawsuit on her own behalf, without the EEOC as a plaintiff.  The 6th Circuit has interpreted RFRA to impose its restriction on the federal government but not on private plaintiffs suing to enforce their rights under federal statutes.  Since EEOC is the plaintiff, however, this is a case of the government seeking to impose a burden on the free exercise of religion by a business corporation, and RFRA is implicated.

District Judge Cox, bound by 6th Circuit precedent to find that Stephens had a potentially valid discrimination claim under Title VII (see Smith v. City of Salem, Ohio, 378 F. 3d 566 (2004)), nonetheless concluded that ordering a remedy for Stephens would substantially impair the Funeral Home’s rights under RFRA, granting summary judgment to the funeral home.  In another contested issue in the case, Judge Cox ruled that the EEOC could not pursue in this lawsuit a claim that the Funeral Home’s policy of paying for male employees’ uniforms but not for female employees’ uniforms violated Title VII’s sex discrimination provision.  Cox held that this claim did not grow naturally out of the investigation of Stephens’ discrimination charge, and so must be litigated separately.

The 6th Circuit reversed on both points.  As to the uniform issue, the Court found that the EEOC’s investigation of Stephens’ discrimination claim naturally led to investigating the company’s uniform policy, since the question of which uniform Stephens could wear was directly involved in Rost’s decision to terminate her.  The court reversed the summary judgment and remanded the question back to the district court to determine whether the uniform policy, which the funeral home has since modified to provide some subsidy for the cost of women’s uniforms, violates Title VII.

More significantly, the court found that Judge Cox erred on several key points in his analysis of the company’s summary judgment motion.

Cox had determined that the 6th Circuit does not recognize gender identity claims under Title VII, as such, but in rejecting a prior motion to dismiss the case had concluded that Stephens could proceed on the theory that she was fired for failing to conform to her employer’s stereotype about how men are supposed to present themselves and dress in the workplace.  Rost stated in his deposition that he objected to men dressing as women – which is how he views Stephens in light of his religious belief that gender identity is just a social construct that violates God’s plan and not a reality.

After reviewing the court’s prior transgender discrimination decisions, Judge Moore concluded that the EEOC’s view of the statute to cover gender identity discrimination directly, without reference to sex stereotypes, is correct.  “First,” she wrote, “it is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex.”

She referred to the 7th Circuit’s Hively decision, a sexual orientation case, which employed the same reasoning to find that Title VII covers sexual orientation claims.  “Here, we ask whether Stephens would have been fired if Stephens had been a woman who sought to comply with the women’s dress code.  The answer quite obviously is no.  This, in and of itself, confirms that Stephens’ sex impermissibly affected Rost’s decision to fire Stephens.”

The court also referred to a landmark ruling by the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, Schroer v. Billington, 577 F. Supp. 2nd 293 (D.D.C. 2008), which allowed a transgender discrimination claim against the Library of Congress, which had withdrawn an employment offer when informed that the applicant was transitioning.

And, of course, the court noted the Supreme Court’s Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins ruling (490 U.S. 228 (1989)), stating that Title VII requires “gender” to be “irrelevant to employment decisions.”  Moore wrote, “Gender (or sex) is not being treated as ‘irrelevant to employment decisions’ if an employee’s attempt or desire to change his or her sex leads to an adverse employment decision.”

Of course, Moore noted, transgender discrimination implicates the sex stereotype theory as well.  Referring to Smith v. City of Salem, she wrote, “We did not expressly hold in Smith that discrimination on the basis of transgender status is unlawful, though the opinion has been read to say as much – both by this circuit and others,” and then proceeded to say as much!  “Such references support what we now directly hold: Title VII protects transgender persons because of their transgender or transitioning status, because transgender or transitioning status constitutes an inherently gender non-conforming trait.”

In light of this holding, the funeral home had to be found in violation of the statute unless it was entitled to some exception or some affirmative defense.  One argument made in an amicus brief in support of the funeral home suggested that a person employed as a funeral director could be covered by the constitutionally-mandated ministerial exception recognized by the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012).  The Supreme Court said that it is a component of free exercise of religion that if somebody is being employed to perform religious functions, the government could not dictate the hiring decision.  The court rejected this defense, noting that the funeral home has conceded that it is not a “religious organization” and was not claiming the “ministerial exception” for any of its employees.  Furthermore, even if the funeral home tried to claim the exception, the court found it would not apply to the position of a funeral director in a for-profit funeral home business.  Stephen was not employed to serve a religious function, and the duties of a funeral directly only incidentally involved any religious function in the way of facilitating participation of religious funeral celebrants.

Turning to the RFRA defense, the court first dispensed with the argument that as Stephens had intervened as a co-plaintiff, RFRA had been rendered irrelevant because this was no longer purely a government enforcement case.  The EEOC remains the principal appellant in the case, and the court would not dismiss the RFRA concern on that basis.

However, the court found, significantly, that requiring the funeral home to employ Stephens after her transition would not impose a “substantial” burden within the meaning of RFRA.  The funeral home argued that the “very operation of the Funeral Home constitutes protected religious exercise because Rost feels compelled by his faith to serve grieving people through the funeral home, and thus requiring the Funeral Home to authorize a male funeral director to wear the uniform for female funeral directors would directly interfere with – and thus impose a substantial burden on – the Funeral Home’s ability to carry out Rost’s religious exercise of caring for the grieving.”

Rost suggested two ways this would impose a substantial burden.  First, he suggested, letting Stephens dress as a woman “would often create distractions for the deceased’s loved ones and thereby hinder their healing process (and the Funeral Home’s ministry),” and second, “forcing the Funeral Home to violate Rost’s faith would significantly pressure Rost to leave the funeral industry and end his ministry to grieving people.”  The court did not accept either of these as “substantial within the meaning of RFRA.”

For one thing, a basic tenet of anti-discrimination law is that businesses may not rely on customer preferences or biases as an excuse to refuse to employ people for a reason forbidden by Title VII.  Courts have ruled that even if it is documented that employing somebody will alienate some customers, that cannot be raised as a defense to a valid discrimination claim.  “We hold as a matter of law,” wrote Moore, “that a religious claimant cannot rely on customers’ presumed biases to establish a substantial burden under RFRA.”

The court rejected Rost’s argument that the EEOC’s position put him to the choice of violating his religious beliefs by, for example, paying for a women’s uniform for Stephens to wear, or otherwise quitting the funeral business.  The court pointed out that there is no legal requirement for Rost to pay for uniforms for his staff.  This is distinguishable from the Hobby Lobby case, where the issue was a regulation requiring employers to bear the cost of contraceptive coverage.  Further, wrote Moore, “simply permitting Stephens to wear attire that reflects a conception of gender that is at odds with Rost’s religious beliefs is not a substantial burden under RFRA,” because “as a matter of law, tolerating Stephens’ understanding of her sex and gender identity is not tantamount to supporting it.”

Since the court found no substantial burden, it did not necessarily have to tackle the question of the government’s justification for imposing any burden at all.  But with an eye to a likely appeal of this case, the court went ahead to determine whether, if it is wrong about this and the Supreme Court were to find that this application of Title VII to Rost’s business does impose a substantial burden, it passes the strict scrutiny test established by RFRA.

As to this, the court reached perhaps its most significant new ruling in the case: Having identified gender identity claims as coming within the ambit of sex discrimination claims, the court had to determine whether the government has a compelling interest and that enforcing Title VII is the least intrusive way of achieving that interest.  Even the Funeral Home was willing to concede that on a general level the government has a compelling interest, expressed through Title VII, in eradicating sex discrimination in the workplace, but the Funeral Home argued that interest did not justify this particular case, compelling it to let a man dress as a woman while working as a funeral director.  “The Funeral Home’s construction of the compelling-interest test is off-base,” wrote Moore.  “Rather than focusing on the EEOC’s claim – that the Funeral Home terminated Stephens because of her proposed gender nonconforming behavior – the Funeral Home’s test focuses instead on its defense that the Funeral Home merely wishes to enforce an appropriate workplace uniform.  But the Funeral Home has not identified any cases where the government’s compelling interest was framed as its interest in disturbing a company’s workplace policies.”  The question, according to the court’s interpretation of Supreme Court precedents, is whether “the interests generally served by a given government policy or statute would not be ‘compromised’ by granting an exemption to a particular individual or group.”

“Failing to enforce Title VII against the Funeral Home means the EEOC would be allowing a particular person – Stephens – to suffer discrimination, and such an outcome is directly contrary to the EEOC’s compelling interest in combating discrimination in the workforce.” And, continued Moore, “here, the EEOC’s compelling interest in eradicating discrimination applies with as much force to Stephens as to any other employee discriminated against based on sex.”

The court specifically rejected the Funeral Home’s argument that its religious free exercise rights should take priority as being derived from the 1st Amendment, because that would go directly against Supreme Court precedent, which has rejected the idea that individuals and businesses generally enjoy a 1st Amendment right to refuse to comply with laws because of their religious objections.  Congress did not have authority, in the first version of RFRA that it passed and that was invalidated by the Supreme Court, to overrule a Supreme Court decision.  What RFRA does is to create a statutory right, not to channel a constitutional right, and the statutory right is circumscribed to cases where a federal law imposes a substantial burden on free exercise without having a compelling justification for doing so.  This does, not, according to the 6th Circuit, elevate a business’s free exercise rights above an individual’s statutory protection against discrimination.  (Indeed, Justice Samuel Alito said as much in his Hobby Lobby opinion for the Supreme Court, albeit in the context of race discrimination.)

Finally, as required by RFRA, the court found that requiring compliance with Title VII was the least restrictive means available for the government to achieve its compelling interest in eradicating employment discrimination because of sex.  The district court had suggested that the EEOC could pursue a less restrictive alternative by getting the parties to agree to a gender-neutral uniform for the workplace, thus removing Rost’s objection to a “man dressed as a woman.”  “The district court’s suggestion, although appealing in its tidiness, is tenable only if we excise from the case evidence of sex stereotyping in areas other than attire,” wrote Judge Moore.  “Though Rost does repeatedly say that he terminated Stephens because she ‘wanted to dress as a woman’ and ‘would no longer dress as a man,’ the record also contains uncontroverted evidence that Rost’s reasons for terminating Stephens extended to other aspects of Stephens’s intended presentation.”  It was not just about the uniforms.

The court could have reversed the summary judgment and sent the case back to the district court to reconsider its holding and determine whether a trial was needed, but in fact there are no material facts in dispute once one treats the 6th Circuit’s opinion as presenting the law of the case on interpreting Title VII and RFRA.  With no material facts to be resolved at this stage, the 6th Circuit directly granted summary judgment to the EEOC on its claim that the Funeral Home violated Title VII and is not entitled to a defense under RFRA.  Stephens won on the merits, unless the Funeral Home is successful in getting the Supreme Court to take the case and reverse the 6th Circuit’s decision.

The appeal was argued for the EEOC by Anne Noel Occhialinio, and for Stephens by ACLU attorney John A. Knight.  Douglas G. Wardlow of Alliance Defending Freedom argued on behalf of the Funeral Home.  The case attracted amicus briefs from Lambda Legal, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Private Rights/Public Conscience Project (New York) and various law firms offering pro bono assistance to amici on briefs.

Judge Moore was appointed to the court by President Bill Clinton.  The other judges on the unanimous panel were Helene N. White, appointed by President George W. Bush, and Bernice W. Donald, appointed by President Barack Obama.  Showing a recent trend in diversifying the federal bench, the panel was, unusually, made up entirely of female circuit judges.  As a result of several appointments by President Obama, half of the active judges on the 6th Circuit are women, the only federal appellate court yet to achieve gender parity.

Federal Judge Issues National Preliminary Injunction against ACA Regulation Banning Gender Identity Discrimination

Posted on: January 1st, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

In an eleventh-hour action, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor (N.D. Texas, Wichita Div.) issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on December 31, barring the federal government from enforcing part of a new regulation that was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2017, which interpreted the prohibition on discrimination because of sex under the Affordable Care Act to extend to discrimination because of “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy.” Franciscan Alliance v. Burwell, Civ. Action No. 7:16-cv-00108-O.  Judge O’Connor’s action echoed his earlier issuance, on August 21, 2016, of a nationwide preliminary injunction against the enforcement by the federal government of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to protect transgender schoolchildren from discrimination, in State of Texas v. United States of America, 2016 WL 4426495 (N.D. Texas, August 21, 2016).  In both opinions, O’Connor rejected the Obama Administration’s position that discrimination because of gender identity or expression is a form of “sex discrimination” that is illegal under federal laws, a question that the U.S. Supreme Court may address if it gets to the merits in G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, 822 F.3d 709 (4th Cir.), cert. granted, 136 S. Ct. 2442 (No. 16A52)(2016).  Judge O’Connor’s analytical task was “simplified” because the ACA anti-discrimination provision, Section 1557, incorporates by reference the sex discrimination ban in Title IX that was the subject of the judge’s prior preliminary injunction ruling.

The ACA authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to adopt regulations through the procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to give detailed substance to the broad terms of the statute. The ACA provides in Section 1557 that health programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance not discriminate on grounds prohibited by four federal statutes.  Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal money, was one of the listed statutes and thus incorporated by reference into the ACA.  (Others deal with discrimination because of race, national origin or disability.)  The Title IX regulations adopted by the Education Department in the 1970s include an express religious exemption provision, so that religiously-controlled educational institutions are exempt from Title IX compliance to the extent that compliance would violate their religious tenets.  After the ACA was enacted in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services began the APA process, drafting proposed regulations, publishing them for comment, and publishing a final regulation that, with respect to the provisions in dispute in this case, was to go into effect on January 1, 2017.  During the Obama Administration, several different federal agencies responsible for interpreting and enforcing sex discrimination bans have been working through the issue of how these relate to gender identity.  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was the first to issue a ruling, in the context of adjudicating a federal job applicant’s complaint, that gender identity discrimination was actionable under Title VII’s sex discrimination ban, but in so doing it was actually following earlier case law, most specifically from the 6th Circuit, which used sex stereotyping analysis first accepted by the Supreme Court in 1989 in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, a Title VII case.  The HHS regulation drafters adopted similar reasoning to include “gender identity” in their proposed regulation, and included gender identity in the final Rule published in the federal register on May 18, 2016.  81 Fed. Reg. 31376-31473 (codified at 45 CFR Sec. 92).  By the time of that publication, the Education Department had taken the position that Title IX bans gender identity discrimination, in the context of a restroom access dispute in the %Gloucester County School District% case and a subsequent “Dear Colleague” letter published on its website and distributed to school districts nationwide.  However, HHS did not include in its proposed or final rule the religious exemption language from Title IX.

Several states and some religious health care providers joined together to challenge the new HHS Rule, not in its entirety but in a focused attack on the inclusion of “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy” in the non-discrimination provisions. Blatantly forum shopping, they filed their suit in the U.S. District Court in Wichita Falls, an outpost of the Northern District of Texas where Judge O’Connor, the only judge assigned to that courthouse, sits a few days every month. (O’Connor’s chambers are in Fort Worth, the location of his home courtroom.)  Filing in a major city would subject the plaintiffs to a random assignment of a judge; filing in Wichita Falls guaranteed that their case would be heard by Judge O’Connor. O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, has a propensity to issue nationwide injunctions against regulatory actions of the Obama Administration on grounds that they exceed executive branch authority.  His August 21 preliminary injunction in the Title IX case was not his first.  There is no logical reason why this case should have been filed in the Wichita Falls court, but plaintiffs can claim proper venue there by pointing to local members of the co-plaintiff Christian Medical & Dental Association (CMDA), a national organization, who may reside within the geographical confines of the Wichita Falls court, or to local Texas state agencies whose operation in that area would be affected.  (The court does not engage in a venue analysis, despite the obvious forum-shopping.)  Other private plaintiffs are Franciscan Alliance, Inc. and its wholly owned entity Specialty Physicians of Illinois LLC.  The public plaintiffs are the states of Texas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Kentucky and Mississippi.  The heavy hand of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton looms over the litigation, since Paxton has said, in effect, that his job is to sue the federal government every day on behalf of the right of Texas to operate free of federal regulatory constraints. Plaintiffs moved for partial summary judgment or, in the alternative, a preliminary injunction, on October 21, 2016, and the court agreed to expedite briefing and hearing so as to be able to rule, at least on the preliminary injunction, before the Rule could go into effect on January 1.

There is a basic argument between the parties as to the requirements imposed by the Rule. The plaintiffs argue that under the rule they would be required to provide gender transition surgery and abortions or suffer liability to patients and potential loss of federal funding eligibility.  They claim that this would violate their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and that the government’s interpretation of the ban on sex discrimination to cover “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy” went beyond regulatory authority.  HHS argues that the rule does not compel either procedure in every case, merely banning discrimination on these bases.  Thus, for example, it could be argued, if a health care provider/institution performs mastectomies, it may not take the position that it will perform a mastectomy for a woman as a treatment for breast cancer but will not perform a mastectomy for a transgender man as part of his transition process, as this would be sex discrimination. Both women and transgender men are entitled to mastectomies.  Similar arguments are made for a variety of the component parts of procedures, including, for example, hormone therapy, sterilization procedures and the like.  A woman suffering an estrogen deficiency can receive hormone therapy, and so can a transgender woman; depriving the transgender woman of estrogen therapy because she was identified male at birth is sex discrimination.  In effect, argue the private plaintiffs, the non-discrimination requirement would inevitably require them to perform procedures that violate their religious views, and, argue the public plaintiffs, would require them to violate various state laws and regulations, such as banning the termination of pregnancies in state facilities or the use of state Medicaid funds for gender transition or pregnancy termination procedures.  Judge O’Connor agreed with the private plaintiffs that however the dispute over interpretation is resolved, there is a likelihood that their exercise of religion would be substantially burdened.

A portion of the decision, not detailed here, goes through the analysis of jurisdiction, ripeness and administrative exhaustion, finding that none of those doctrines would require a finding against the court’s jurisdiction to grant the requested relief on this motion. Proceeding to the merits, Judge O’Connor provided a detailed discussion of the tests for issuing a preliminary injunction.

First, as to likelihood of success on the merits, he found that Title IX does not on its face ban discrimination because of “gender identity” or “termination of pregnancy.” Most of the discussion focuses on the “gender identity” issue, and channels the discussion accompanying his August 21 preliminary injunction against Title IX enforcement in gender identity cases.  The discussion regarding the abortion issue focuses on the failure of HHS to incorporate in its new regulation the religious and abortion exemptions in existing Title IX regulations, arguing that Congress’s wording of the Section 1557 non-discrimination provision led to the conclusion that such incorporation was intended by Congress.

“The precise question at issue in this case is: What constitutes Title IX sex discrimination?” he wrote. “The text of Section 1557 is neither silent nor ambiguous as to its interpretation of sex discrimination.  Section 1557 clearly adopted Title IX’s existing legal structure for prohibited sex discrimination.  42 U.S.C. sec. 18116(a).  For the reasons set out more fully below, this Court has previously concluded: the meaning of sex in Title IX unambiguously refers to ‘the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.’  Texas v. United States, No. 7:16-cv-00054, 2016 WL 4426495, at *14 (N.D. Tex. Aug. 21, 2016).”  Judge O’Connor reinforced this reference with a citation to the federal district court ruling in %Johnston v. Univ. of Pittsburgh of Com. Sys. of Higher Educ.%, 97 F. Supp. 3d 657, 674 (W.D. Pa. 2015), %appeal dismissed% (Mar. 30, 2016), rejecting a Title IX gender identity discrimination claim by a transgender college student with restroom access issues, but omits reference at this point to the contrary ruling the 4th Circuit in the Gloucester County case.  Because he finds Title IX unambiguous on this point, he concludes that the HHS Rule is not entitled to Chevron deference that would normally be accorded a regulation adopted under the APA, and proceeds to apply his own interpretation of the statute, in which he finds Congress’s “binary definition of sex” to be shown by references in the statute to “students of one sex,” “both sexes,” and “students of the other sex.”  He also appeals to “ordinary meaning,” to the failure of Congress to spell out any intent to cover “gender identity,” and to the fact that as of the time the ACA was enacted, federal agencies had not yet begun to treat “gender identity” discrimination as cognizable under sex discrimination statutes.

He wrote that “even if, as Defendants argue, the definition of sex discrimination was determined in 2010 when the ACA incorporated Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination, the Court is not persuaded it was passed with the Rule’s expansive scope in mind because: (1) Congress knew how but did not use language indicating as much, and (2) in 2010 no federal court or agency had interpreted Title IX sex discrimination to include gender identity.” (To this point he quoted a Washington Post article from 2015 stating that the new HHS Rule “for the first time includes bans on gender identity discrimination as a form of sexual discrimination, language that advocacy groups have pushed for and immediately hailed as groundbreaking.”)  And, of course, he notes that before the ACA was passed and “for more than forty years after the passage of Title IX in 1972, no federal court or agency had concluded sex should be defined to include gender identity” in a Title IX case.  In a footnote, he rejected the government’s attempt to bolster its case by reference to Price Waterhouse, pointing out that it was Title IX, not Title VII, which was incorporated by reference into the ACA.

As to the failure of the Rule to incorporate Title IX’s religious exemption language, he wrote, “The text of Section 1557 prohibits discrimination ‘on the ground prohibited under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.).’ . . . That Congress included the signal ‘et seq.’, which means ‘and the following,’ after the citation to Title IX can only mean Congress intended to incorporate the entire statutory structure, including the abortion and religious exemptions.  Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, but exempts from this prohibition entities controlled by religious organizations when the proscription would be inconsistent with religious tenets.  20 U.S.C. sec. 1681(a)(3).  Title IX also categorically exempts any application that would require a covered entity to provide abortion or abortion-related services. 20 U.S.C. sec. 1688.  Therefore, a religious organization refusing to act inconsistent with its religious tenets on the basis of sex does not discriminate on the ground prohibited by Title IX,” and any attempt by HHS to impose the non-discrimination requirement without including the religious exemption violates Congressional intent.  O’Connor bolstered this point by invoking the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, finding that the Rule “places substantial pressure on Plaintiffs to abstain from religious exercise” by forcing them to provide services contrary to their religious tenets, and that the government’s desire to expand access to “transition and abortion procedures,” even if deemed a “compelling interest” for purposes of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was not the least restrictive alternative for providing such access, and thus failed under Hobby Lobby.  Taking his cue from Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in that case, O’Connor pointed out that the government could offer to pay for transition and abortion services to be provided by those who did not have religious objections to them in order to avoid burdening the Plaintiff’s religious rights.

In another point worth noting, O’Connor cited to an HHS study showing that the medical community is not unanimous on the value and necessity of performing transition procedures, particularly on minors, undermining the “compelling interest” that the government must show under RFRA to justify substantially burdening health care providers with sincere religious objections to performing such procedures.

Having concluded that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their attack, O’Connor found that they easily satisfied the other requirements for preliminary injunctive relief, noting in particular that an ongoing investigation of the state of Texas’s practices made the potential of harm to the Plaintiffs more than hypothetical, as did the looming requirement for the private Plaintiffs to change the range of services they offer or risk loss of federal funding. More significantly, as to the scope of the injunction, he cited authority that “the scope of injunctive relief is dictated by the extent of the violation established, not by the geographical extent of the plaintiff class,” and that “a nationwide injunction is appropriate when a party brings a facial challenge to agency action under the APA.”  In this case, he pointed out, “CMDA’s membership extends across the country and the Rule applies broadly to ‘almost all licensed physicians,’” quoting the HHS description published in the Federal Register.  “Accordingly, the Rule’s harm is felt by healthcare providers and states across the country, including all of CMDA’s members, and the Court finds a nationwide injunction appropriate.”  Noting a severability provision in the Rule, he observed that the injunction only applied to the inclusion of “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy” under the definition of sex discrimination, and did not bar enforcement of any other part of the Rule.  A preliminary injunction stays in effect until the court issues a ruling on the merits, unless it is reversed on appeal.  As of December 31, the Obama Administration had barely three weeks left in office, to be succeeded by an administration much less likely to defend the Rule, so while this is merely preliminary relief for the Plaintiffs, it signals a major and probably long-term setback to efforts by transgender people to obtain non-discriminatory health care, including coverage for medically-necessary transition procedures.

Funeral Home Wins Summary Judgment Motion in Transgender Discrimination Case with RFRA Defense

Posted on: August 20th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox ruled on August 18 that a funeral home that discharged a transgender funeral director because of her intention to dress according to the employer’s dress code for women was not liable for sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ruling, granting the employer’s motion for summary judgment, stemmed from the court’s conclusion that the employer prevailed on a religious free exercise defense raised under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), because the plaintiff in the case, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency that enforces Title VII, had failed to show that requiring the employer to allow the employee to use the approved female outfit was the “least restrictive alternative” to achieve the government’s compelling interest in preventing sex stereotyping discrimination in the workplace.  The case is EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 109716, 2016 WL 4396083 (E.D. Mich.).

Importantly, Judge Cox made clear in his opinion that had the employee, Amiee Stephens, sued the funeral home on her own behalf, the funeral home would not have been able to raise the RFRA religious freedom defense, and she would most likely have won her Title VII case. Within the 6th Circuit (the states of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee), the controlling circuit precedent states that a RFRA defense may only be raised in a case where “the government” is either the plaintiff or the defendant.

There are similar controlling precedents in the 7th and 9th Circuits, according to the opinion in the 6th Circuit case on which Judge Cox relied, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists v. McGill, 617 F.3d 402 (2010).  In the 2nd Circuit, which includes New York, there is a contrary precedent by a three- judge panel which has been questioned by a different three-judge panel, so the issue is a bit muddled.  The Supreme Court has never made clear whether RFRA is so limited in employment discrimination cases, but in the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell case, in which the Court ruled that business corporations may claim protection from government actions under RFRA, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Court in dicta (non-precedential language) that an employer would not be able to rely on RFRA to defend against a Title VII race discrimination charge.  He made this statement in response to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s statement in her dissent that the majority’s approach would endanger the enforcement of Title VII and other anti-discrimination laws.  Alito’s statement did not mention any distinction between cases brought by the EEOC and cases brought by individual employees.

Aimee Stephens – then known as Anthony Stephens – was hired by the Harris Funeral Home in October 2007. Stephens was identified as male on the Funeral Home’s employment records.  Stephens worked as a funeral director and embalmer for nearly six years under that name.  On July 31, 2013, Stephens sent a letter to her boss, Thomas Rost (who owns over 90% of the stock in Harris Funeral Homes, Inc.) and to her co-workers, telling them about her female gender identity and her determination to transition.  She wrote, “The first step I must take is to live and work full-time as a woman for one year.  At the end of my vacation on August 26, 2013, I will return to work as my true self, Amiee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire.”  Stephens stated in the letter that eventually she would be undergoing “sex reassignment surgery.”

The Funeral Home has a dress code specifying dark suits for men and “a suit or plain conservative dress” for women. In the letter, of course, Stephens indicated that she would wear “appropriate business attire” as a woman.  In response to the letter, Rost fired Stephens on August 15, telling her, according to his deposition testimony, “Anthony, this is not going to work out.  And that your services would no longer be needed here.”  Stephens testified that her understanding was that the way she proposed to dress was the immediate issue leading to her discharge.  (In his opinion, Judge Cox pointed out that there was no discussion in the depositions about other aspects of Stephens’ proposed appearance, such as grooming or hair style.)

Stephens filed a sex discrimination charge with the EEOC, alleging that she was fired due to her sex and gender identity. After investigating the charge, the EEOC concluded that there was “reasonable cause” to believe that Stephens’ “allegations are true.”  The EEOC also concluded, as a result of its investigation, that the Funeral Home was discriminating against its female employees because it provided appropriate suits and ties for male employees but required female employees to assume all expenses of complying with the dress code.

After the EEOC concludes an investigation resulting in a finding of “probable cause” without any kind of settlement being achieved, the case can go in either of two directions. The agency can decide to initiate a lawsuit against the employer, or it can notify the employee, in a “right to sue” letter, that the agency will not be bringing a lawsuit but that the employee may do so directly.  In 2014 the EEOC had begun an effort to establish that gender identity claims can be litigated under Title VII, and chose this as one of its first cases for direct litigation, so the EEOC filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on September 25, 2014.

As expected, the Funeral Home filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming that gender identity discrimination claims are not covered under Title VII. Responding to the motion, Judge Cox agreed with the Funeral Home that gender identity discrimination claims are not covered, as such, but refused to dismiss the Title VII claim, finding that it was covered by 6th Circuit precedents involving transgender public employees who sued on a theory of “sex stereotyping,” derived from a Supreme Court decision called Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.

The EEOC’s complaint had presented the court with alternative theories in this case, including sex-stereotyping. If an employer discharges an employee for failing to conform to the employer’s stereotyped views as to how employees of a particular sex should dress, that may violate the ban on sex discrimination unless the employer can prove that dressing in a particular way is a bona fide occupational qualification necessary to perform the essential functions of the job.  Such potential employer defenses are generally irrelevant in deciding a motion to dismiss a claim, which is based entirely on whether the allegations in the plaintiff’s complaint are sufficient to “state a claim” under the statute, so Cox’s decision denying the motion to dismiss did not address this potential defense.  The Funeral Home did not mention any religious freedom claim under RFRA in its motion to dismiss, either, and it would have been irrelevant at that point.

After the motion to dismiss was denied, the case proceeded to discovery, during which the attorneys conducted depositions of the parties.  After discovery, the EEOC and the Funeral Home filed motions for summary judgment, contending that there were no contested facts requiring trial and the court could rule as a matter of law.   After the Funeral Home had lost its motion to dismiss, the Funeral Home got new legal representation from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a so-called Christian public interest law firm, which raised for the first time the claim that the Funeral Home was privileged to discharge Stephens regardless of Title VII because Mr. Rost’s objection to her proposed mode of dress was based on his religious views against transgender status.

Rost asserted his belief that gender and biological sex are created by God and immutable. During discovery ADF presented evidence, not questioned by the EEOC, that this was Rost’s sincere religious belief and, furthermore, that he had consistently expressed that he sought to operate this family-owned corporate business in line with his religious beliefs.  There is relevant language about this on the Funeral Home’s website and in its literature.

Judge Cox’s August 18 ruling was presented in three parts. In the first, he found that the Funeral Home had violated Title VII by discharging Stephens over the anticipated dress code violation.  In the view of Rost, Stephens was immutably a man, regardless of what Stephens asserted about her gender identity, and thus was required to dress as a man consistent with the business’s dress code.  There are many precedents under Title VII upholding the right of employers to adopt reasonable dress codes that do not impose greater burdens on employees of one or the other sex.  The Funeral Home relied on these precedents, especially one from the 9th Circuit upholding the right of an employer to require women to wear makeup.  Judge Cox noted, however, that a 6th Circuit case had specifically differed with that 9th Circuit case, and had rejected the idea that a dress code would necessarily insulate an employer from a charge of sex stereotyping.  Referring to the 6th Circuit’s ruling in an early gender identity sex stereotyping case, Judge Cox wrote, “It appears unlikely that the Smith court would allow an employer like the employer in Jesperson [the 9th Circuit make-up case] to avoid liability for a Title VII sex-stereotyping claim simply by virtue of having put its gender-based stereotypes into a formal policy.  Accordingly. . . the Court rejects the Funeral Home’s sex-specific dress code defense to the Title VII sex-stereotyping claim asserted on behalf of Stephens [by the EEOC] in this case.”

However, in the second part of his opinion, Judge Cox found that the employer should prevail based on a RFRA defense. The Funeral Home argued that requiring it to allow a funeral director identified as male in its employment records to wear clothing specified for a woman presented an unacceptable burden on Rost’s right to operate his business consistent with his religious views.  Assuming the sincerity of Rost’s religious belief, which EEOC did not challenge, Cox found that the EEOC had failed to show that requiring the Funeral Home to let Stephens dress as a woman was the “least restrictive alternative” to achieve the government’s compelling interest in preventing sex stereotyping in the workplace.

Indeed, Cox pointed out, the EEOC’s own theory of the Title VII case was that requiring a particular mode of dress based on gender was a form of sex stereotyping, so its argument that the Funeral Home had to let Stephens dress as a woman under the employer’s dress code in order to achieve the EEOC’s compelling interest in opposing sex-stereotyping was contradictory. Cox noted that the EEOC had not presented any evidence of an attempt to negotiate with the Funeral Home about some sort of gender-neutral dress code that might be acceptable to both Stephens and Rost, and there was deposition testimony by Rost suggesting that a pants suit might be an acceptable compromise. The real problem, from this point of view, was Rost’s insistence that Stephens could not wear a skirt or dress.

Thus, the court concluded that the Funeral Home had a valid defense to the Title VII claim under RFRA, and granted summary judgment to the Funeral Home on that claim.

However, at the end of this part of the decision, responding to an argument by the EEOC that this ruling would severely undermine enforcement of Title VII, Cox pointed out that under 6th Circuit precedent the Funeral Home would not have been able to raise the RFRA defense if Stephens had filed suit against it directly.  “In the vast majority of Title VII employment discrimination cases,” he wrote, “the case is brought by the employee, not the EEOC.  Accordingly, at least in the Sixth and Seventh Circuits, it appears that there cannot be a RFRA defense in a Title VII case brought by an employee against a private employer because that would be a case between private parties.”

The 6th Circuit’s opinion is based on a close reading of RFRA, which can be construed to extend only to cases in which the government is either the plaintiff or the defendant.  That reading is controversial, but so far it seems to have been accepted in several of the circuits.  Thus, although in this case the Funeral Home was able to raise a RFRA defense because the lawsuit was brought by the EEOC, in the vast majority of cases, such a defense would be unavailable to it.

Since Judge Cox had rejected all of the other defenses offered by the Funeral Home under Title VII, consequently, it seems that Stephens would have won on the motion for summary judgment had she sued directly, leaving RFRA out of the picture.

In the last part of the opinion, Judge Cox granted summary judgment to the Funeral Home on the EEOC’s claim that the dress code violated Title VII because the employer provided suits for men but required women to purchase their own work clothes without subsidy. He found that this claim did not relate to the issues in Stephens’ complaint, so it should have been dealt with in a separate lawsuit.  In any event, it seems that the Funeral Home had reacted to the EEOC’s investigation by changing its dress policy to provide financial assistance to female employees, so this issue might be moot.

Judge Cox was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush. He was previously a Michigan state court judge and before that had been a partner in a Michigan law firm.  He is the older brother of former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox.

Early press coverage of the ruling failed to note Judge Cox’s explanation that the RFRA defense could be raised by the employer only in a case brought by the government, thus making it sound, incorrectly, as if Cox had ruled that employers with religious objections to transgender employees are exempt from any non-discrimination obligation under Title VII. Cox made clear that, at least in the 6th Circuit, the RFRA exemption is only available in an employment discrimination case as a defense to a lawsuit by the government.

 

 

 

The Obama Government Contractor Executive Order

Posted on: July 19th, 2014 by Art Leonard No Comments

The White House has announced that President Barack Obama will sign an executive order on July 21, 2014, amending Executive Order 11246 to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as prohibited grounds of discrimination by government contractors.  Announcements emanating from the White House suggest that the addition of these terms to the existing executive order are the only substantive changes that will be made.  The non-discrimination requirements will be included in new federal contracts made after the Labor Department has published final regulations implementing the amendments, probably beginning early in 2015.  Only new contracts entered after that date will be affected by the amendments.  [Update: The Order was signed this morning, July 21, and in addition to amending EO 11246, also amends EO 11478, which establishes non-discrimination policy within the Executive Branch, by addition “gender identity” to the categories already listed in the EO, which was originally adopted in 1969 by President Richard M. Nixon and was amended by Bill Clinton to add “sexual orientation” during the 1990s.]

EO 11246 was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 24, 1965, just a few months after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect at the beginning of July 1965.  EO 11246 charged the Labor Department, through its Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), to oversee a program under which “government contracting agencies” would include in every contract (with some exceptions) a provision under which the contractor agreed not to discriminate in employment because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, the categories of forbidden discrimination under Title VII, and agreed to abide by rules, regulations and relevant orders promulgated by the Labor Department to enforce this requirement.  Contractors are required generally to include similar provisions in any subcontracts they make as part of their performance of their federal contracts.  The penalty for “noncompliance” with these requirements could be cancellation, termination or suspension of the contract, and ineligibility for future contracts.  Complaints about noncompliance are handled administratively; the president does not have the power to enact laws that can be enforced by individual plaintiffs in the federal courts.  Generally EO 11246 charges the Labor Department to investigate complaints, to try to facilitate settlements, and to refer cases that involve violations of federal statutes to the appropriate enforcement agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  Of course, the EEOC would only have jurisdiction to initiate enforcement action over complaints involving forms of discrimination prohibited by the statutes that agency is charged with enforcing, such as Title VII.

In 2002, President George W. Bush amended the executive order to provide that “this Order shall not apply to a Government contractor or subcontractor that is a religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society, with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on by such corporation, association, educational institution, or society of its activities.”  However, the Order states, “Such contractors or subcontractors are not exempted or excused from complying with the other requirements contained in this Order.”

According to advance word from the White House, President Obama’s amendments will not change this 2002 religious exemption and will not expand it in any way.  That is to say, religious corporations, associations, educational institutions or societies that contract with the federal government to provide services or goods will have to agree not to discriminate in their employment practices on the ground of sexual orientation or gender identity, which may present some of those organizations with particular challenges in light of the religious doctrines to which they adhere.  This raises immediate questions about whether religious organizations might plausibly argue that they cannot recognize a gay person as a member in good standing of their faith, regardless of that person’s professed beliefs?  Who gets to decide, for example, whether an individual professing to be Catholic but also being openly gay can be denied employment by a Catholic agency under contract to the federal government to provide social welfare services to the public, because the agency does not believe that an openly gay person can be deemed to be a practicing Catholic?

The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause generally protects religious organizations from interference by the government in their religious activities.  The Supreme Court has held that organizations of any type do not have a constitutional right to refuse to comply with laws of general application that do not single out religious practices for prohibition.  At the same time, the Court has held that free exercise of religion includes giving religious organizations free reign in their employment policies regarding “ministers,” persons to be employed to carry out the religious mission of the organization.  There is some controversy about who can be deemed a ministerial employee, litigation tending to focus on teachers and administrators in religious schools who teach secular subjects but are deemed by the schools to be “ministers” nonetheless and required to sign employment contracts that commit them to avoiding conduct that violates the tenets of the religion.

After the Supreme Court issued its key ruling about the requirement to comply with laws of general application, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), providing that persons with religious objections to complying with laws of general application could claim a religious exemption unless the government could show that the government had a compelling interest supporting the general law and that the law provided the least restrictive alternative to achieving that interest.  In effect, Congress wanted to restore prior Supreme Court case law to the extent possible through a statute by imposing upon itself and the federal regulatory apparatus a limitation on its ability to compel people to comply with legal requirements that would violate their religious beliefs.  Many states passed similar laws placing the same restrictions on their own legislative and regulatory functions.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores that the federal Dictionary Act’s definition of “person” to include corporations applies to RFRA, in a case where two closely-held family-owned business corporations claimed an exemption from complying with regulations under the Affordable Care Act requiring them to cover certain contraceptive methods in health insurance for their employees.  The Court went on to hold that, assuming the government had a compelling reason for including these contraceptive methods in its coverage requirements, requiring these employers to arrange for and pay for the coverage was not the least restrictive method of achieving the coverage goal, as the government could provide the coverage directly itself, or could provide some other mechanism that would make the coverage available without imposing on the objecting corporation.  Another example of a less restrictive alternative cited by the Court was a regulation that the administration had adopted for religiously-identified non-profit corporations, who could signify their objections to the specific items of coverage on a form provided by the government that they would submit to their health insurer, which would then be required to provide the coverage and seek reimbursement from the government.  (That regulation is under attack by some religious non-profit corporations, that claim that executing the form and sending it t0 their insurer substantially burdens their free exercise rights as well.)

The Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling raised immediate fears about whether corporations owned or operated by individuals with religious objections to homosexuality and/or same sex marriage might claim exemptions from employing or serving gay people or same-sex couples.  In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited two cases on this point, in which state courts had rejected religious exemption claims from state public accommodations laws by a Minnesota health club, which did not want to have gay members, and a New Mexico wedding photographer, who had rejected a job preparing a wedding album for a lesbian couple.  The New Mexico case also involved that state’s version of RFRA, which the New Mexico Supreme Court held was not violated by application of the public accommodations law to a small business.  Similarly, there is litigation pending in Colorado involving a baker who rejected an order to provide a cake for the wedding celebration of a gay male couple.  These are not the kinds of businesses that would likely contract with the federal government, but the nature of the problem is clear.

Under the Executive Order, for example, could a closely-held family-owned company that produces certain technology that the federal government wants to buy, or that provides consulting services that the federal government wants to obtain, insist that for religious reasons it cannot employ gay people, or more particularly cannot continue to employee gay people who marry same-sex partners?  (There are many reports now of Catholic schools that have employed gay people as teachers and administrators for many years suddenly terminating their employment after learning that these people are marrying or have married a same-sex partner.)  Could a federal contractor refuse to include the same-sex spouse of an employee in its employee benefits plan on the same-basis that it includes different-sex spouses, because of religious objections to same-sex marriage?  EO 11246, as amended on July 21 by President Obama, would probably say no.  But if the protesting contractor sought protection from the non-discrimination requirement under RFRA, how would it fare?

These questions are difficult to answer prospectively.  In his opinion for the Court in Hobby Lobby, Justice Alito said that the court was ruling on the case before it, focusing on whether a closely-held family-owned business with religious objections to some forms of contraception was entitled to an exemption from ACA coverage requirements, at least to the extent that non-profit religiously-affiliated organizations had already been accorded by the Obama Administration in its regulations.  The Court, according to Alito, was not purporting to establish a wide-ranging exception to all legal obligations for all business corporations.  Alito commented that an employer could not rely on its religious beliefs to  seek exemption from the race discrimination requirements of Title VII.  But we don’t know whether that comment implicitly relied on the status of race as a suspect classification under the Equal Protection Clause, or the fact that Title VII recognizes a bona fide occupational qualification defense in cases involving religion, national origin or sex discrimination but not in cases involving race or color.  Did Alito mean to suggest more broadly that the RFRA exemption would not extend to any discrimination claims?  Justice Ginsburg was concerned about this in her dissent when she cited the two gay-specific examples from prior case law.  She might well have also noted the Supreme Court’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, where the majority found that the Boy Scouts’ 1st Amendment freedom of expression and association rights took priority over whatever interest the state of New Jersey had in forbidding public accommodations such as the Boy Scouts from discriminating based on sexual orientation.  What would the Supreme Court majority think about the relative weight of an executive order banning sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination as opposed to statutory protection for free exercise of religion in RFRA?  Statutes would logically outweigh executive orders when there is a conflict between the two.  Can a presidential executive order that is not effectuating a policy adopted by Congress (as the original 11246 was effectuating the policy of Title VII, albeit going beyond it by applying the non-discrimination requirement to businesses exempt from coverage under Title VII due to their size or the nature of their business) signify a compelling government interest, or does Congress have the sole authority to establish compelling government interests, since the President’s Executive Orders as a matter of law and custom are aimed at the internal policies of the Executive Branch?

When religious opponents of the LGBT executive order suggest that it is going to lead to litigation, they are not making empty threats.  It is likely that some contractor who loses or fails to obtain a contract because they will not comply on religious grounds with the non-discrimination requirement will go to court seeking injunctive relief, and the question will be squarely presented whether RFRA applies to the situation and whether a compelling state interest can be based on an executive order that is not effectuating a policy decision by Congress?

Other questions arise about the pending version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, approved last year by the Senate, which provides a rather broad religious exemption beyond the narrow exemption now found in Title VII, the ministerial exemption, or the Bush amendments to EO 11246.  In the wake of Hobby Lobby, one has to ask whether a narrower exemption, similar to that in Title VII, would survive challenge under RFRA?  Questions for which there are at present no firm answers…