The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Groff v. DeJoy, a pending Supreme Court case.
The bishops’ conference joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Anti-Defamation League in support of Gerald Groff, the petitioner in the case.
Groff, an evangelical Protestant and a former US Postal Service employee, declined to work on Sunday—something expected of postal workers after the postal service contracted with Amazon.com to deliver its packages. A Supreme Court precedent, TWA, Inc. v. Hardison (1978), allows employers not to accommodate religious exemptions when they are deemed to cause “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.”
“Americans shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and their faith,” the USCCB and other religious organizations argued in their brief, as they urged the Supreme Court to overturn the 1978 decision. “For decades, employees have been routinely denied religious accommodations.”