Gerald Groff, a former missionary and United States Postal Service employee, refused to work on Sundays out of his Christian convictions and will have his case presented to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
When Groff returned to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from the mission field in Nepal and other parts of Asia, he searched for a career which would not force him to work on Sunday, on which the Bible commends resting from one’s labors for public and private exercises of worship. He selected a position at the Postal Service since employees historically were not expected to work on Sundays, a precedent which changed when the agency signed a contract with Amazon to carry deliveries on the first day of the week.
Groff worked extra shifts throughout the week and occasionally on Saturdays to avoid working on Sundays, even switching posts and taking a lower position in the process. The Postal Service, which tolerated the arrangement for a time, eventually scheduled Groff on Sundays and threatened him with disciplinary actions, prompting him to leave his position and file suit against the Postal Service for violations of his First Amendment liberties.
“Personally, I would like God to be glorified through this. That’s the only thing I care about,” Groff said in an interview with First Liberty Institute, who will represent him before the Supreme Court. “It’s all about what God wants to accomplish through this. Legally, I would love to see a precedent set that people don’t get treated the way I did, that their faith is respected, that if they have the conviction like I did to not work on the Lord’s Day, that would be honored.”
First Liberty Institute Special Counsel Jeremy Dys said in an interview with The Daily Wire that Groff v. DeJoy will seek to overturn a precedent established in a similar case, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 only imposed a “de minimis” burden on employers seeking to accommodate religious workers rather than an “undue hardship” burden, under which employers must undertake significant difficulties or expenses to make accommodations.
“Every circuit court since then has watered down the Civil Rights statute to such a point that they adopted this de minimis standard,” Dys contended. “They all now believe that when it comes to religion, you only have to show just a little bit of a burden on an employer’s business. When it comes to disability and gender, it’s undue hardship. But only when it comes to religion, it’s the minor standard of de minimis.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a statement three years ago asking for the decision in TWA v. Hardison to be reconsidered in the future. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who sat on the Supreme Court during the original 1977 ruling, wrote in a widely cited dissenting opinion that religious diversity was significantly eroded by the case.
“Honoring religious minorities especially has been destroyed by this opinion and our country is all the more poorer until that decision is overturned,” Dys continued. “What this case presents is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to restore religious liberty to the workplace as Congress intended.”
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Dys added that previous cases related to work on the Sabbath have pertained to Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews rather than Protestants. He nevertheless expressed hope that members of the Supreme Court would uphold Groff’s rights to free exercise of religion.
“The hope is that not only does Gerald go back to that career potentially, but also that every employee doesn’t have to face that choice he had to face,” he said. “That they don’t have to face that temptation of compromising their religious beliefs in order to maintain their career.”