WASHINGTON (ABP) — Congressional supporters of religious freedom will try once again with an employees' religious rights bill they've been trying to get passed for more than eight years.
At a Capitol press conference March 17, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) announced they had reintroduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. Kerry has introduced a version of the bill in every Congress since 1996, but it has died every session.
“No American should have to choose between practicing their faith and working at their job,” Kerry told reporters.
“This is an attempt to balance the scales,” Santorum said of the legislation. “This is not a bill that attempts to elevate religion over all other rights; it simply is an accommodation.”
WRFA would place a greater legal burden on employers to prove they have good reasons when infringing on an employee's expression of religious faith – such as refusing to work on the Sabbath or wearing religious garb or jewelry in the workplace.
Supporters of WRFA believe that federal civil-rights laws, as written, were intended to provide such a legal standard of protection for employees, but that court decisions in recent years have eroded it. Now, employers only have to prove that the business would incur minimal inconvenience or financial burdens by accommodating an employee's religious expression in order to deny such an accommodation.
The bill is supported by a wide array of religious and civil-rights organizations, including the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the American Jewish Committee and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations.
However, a handful of other civil-rights groups oppose WRFA, fearing the bill as currently written would allow too much room for employees to flout local laws and infringe on others' religious rights. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign all oppose it.
Barry Lynn, president of Americans United, sent senators a March 15 letter asking them to oppose WRFA “as currently drafted.” While acknowledging that the current legal standard “is insufficient for religious accommodation rights in the workplace,” Lynn wrote, the proposed remedy would “have harmful effects on the civil rights and personal rights of third parties in the workplace, including co-workers, patients, and customers.”
For example, Lynn noted, some state and municipal governments have laws barring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, but WRFA could provide legal room for employees to assert that their opposition to homosexuality led them to make a decision contrary to such a law or their employer's policy.
But David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism — often Lynn's ally on civil-rights issues — said his friend's fears were “misplaced” and that, “where legitimate concerns [with WRFA] exist,” they will be worked out in the normal legislative process.
Kerry, when asked by a reporter if his sponsorship of the bill was part of the campaign to make Democrats look more faith-friendly, laughed. “Look, I started this years ago,” he said. “I believe in this because I have constituents — two Catholic ladies who lost their jobs because they wouldn't work on Christmas — and I said, you know, 'What's going on?'”
Bill supporter Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) backed Kerry up, saying the support for WRFA was a “rare kind of bipartisan moment.”
Souder — one of Congress' most staunch religious conservatives — noted that when the bill was originally introduced in the House, there were more Democrats who co-sponsored it than Republicans. He also said WRFA may face more opposition on his side of the aisle than the Democrats' because of his ideological cohorts' employer-friendliness.
“We have to work on the Republican side as well, if not a little harder,” Souder said. “There, we may face some business opposition.”
The Senate version of the bill is S. 677. The House version is H.R. 1445.