After sustaining a court defeat in November, this week Christian humanitarian aid organization World Vision appealed an employment discrimination case to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A lower federal judge had ordered the organization to pay $120,000 in damages within the case earlier this month after ruling that the organization discriminated when it decided not to rent a job candidate in a gay marriage.
The case shows that gears are starting to show in federal appeals courts on the unresolved issue of how federal nondiscrimination law applies to non secular organizations on the subject of sexual orientation and gender identity. World Vision’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit follows a ruling this month from the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in favor of a Catholic highschool in an identical situation.
The courts are specifically considering the implications of the 2020 US Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, the high court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to gender identity and sexual orientation. The query for appeals courts now: What is the balance between religious liberty and people recent Title VII protections against discrimination?
A federal district court judge ruled in November 2023 that World Vision had violated Title VII when it rescinded a job offer for a customer support position from a girl, Aubry McMahon, after learning about her same-sex marriage. World Vision had argued that the employment decision was justified since it has written standards of conduct that marriage is between a person and a girl. The judge had earlier ruled in favor of World Vision after which reversed his own ruling with a 47-page order.
Lawyers CT interviewed on the time said the judge’s reversal and the sheer length of the ruling showed how unsettled this area of law is.
The damages ruling within the case this month allowed World Vision to avoid a trial over damages, and the $120,000 might be on hold because the case proceeds through appeals. If World Vision ultimately wins the case, it’ll not pay the damages.
If the Ninth Circuit takes the case, the court has a recent track record that might give World Vision attorneys some hope. It issued a significant ruling in favor of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last yr after the ministry was denied access to public schools over the district’s nondiscrimination policies. And while World Vision lost on the district court level, a Catholic school that had lost an identical district level case recently won its case on appeal to the Fourth Circuit.
Charlotte Catholic High School (CCHS) in Charlotte, North Carolina, had fired a substitute teacher after he posted online about his upcoming gay marriage. The English and drama teacher, Lonnie Billard, made the post in 2014 and filed a lawsuit in 2017, showing how long these cases take to wind through federal courts. A federal district judge ruled against the varsity in 2022.
In early May, the Fourth Circuit reversed that opinion and ruled in favor of the Catholic school, saying it was constitutionally shielded from the discrimination statute by the ministerial exception, which shields religious organizations from lawsuits over their hiring and firing of ministry leaders.
“We conclude that because Billard played an important role as a messenger of CCHS’s faith, he falls under the ministerial exception,” the court wrote. “Seemingly secular tasks just like the teaching of English and drama could also be so imbued with religious significance that they implicate the ministerial exception.”
One dissenting judge, Robert Bruce King, agreed with ruling in favor of the varsity but thought the case must have been decided based on the language in Title VII’s religious exemption fairly than the ministerial exception, which is a First Amendment doctrine established by federal courts. The ministerial exception ruling dodged the Title VII query, several lawyers told CT.
King wanted to deal with it.
A “straightforward reading” of Title VII’s religious exemption “bars Billard’s discrimination claim,” wrote King.
“It’s a great ruling,” said John Melcon, an attorney who handles religious employment cases and worked on an amicus transient on the side of the Catholic school. But he added, “We’re upset that the court didn’t determine the case on the premise of the Title VII religious exemption, or a minimum of repudiate the lower court’s evaluation of that issue.”
The Title VII query “stays an unclear area of law,” he said. “The Fourth Circuit was probably intentionally attempting to avoid that issue.”
The reason religious organizations want Title VII exemptions and never just protections under the ministerial exception is that many employees at religious organizations won’t fit a selected court’s definition of a “minister.”
During the oral arguments within the Catholic highschool case, Joshua Block, the lawyer for Billard, said that if the court were going to rule in favor of the Catholic school, he “would much prefer the court fit it right into a ministerial exception bucket.” He explained that he didn’t want courts to expand the parameters of who was religiously exempted to the “janitor, the lunch lady.”
The Catholic highschool had an array of Christian, Mormon, Jewish, and Muslim organizations file on its side within the Fourth Circuit. Among them were the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, Samaritan’s Purse, and The Navigators. Two outstanding religious liberty scholars, Michael McConnell and Douglas Laycock, who’ve argued cases before the Supreme Court, filed their support of the varsity’s case as well.
Billard, the teacher, is near the deadline for an en banc appeal to have a full panel of Fourth Circuit judges hear the case. He also has 90 days from the Fourth Circuit ruling to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Whether it’s Billard’s case, World Vision’s, or one other, the Supreme Court will ultimately have to weigh in on the Title VII issue, Melcon said.
