A U.S. Appeals Court with three Donald Trump appointees decided on Wednesday to overturn a decision by a lower court throwing out a suit by two Alaska Airlines employees who sued the company over charges of religious discrimination, Reuters reports. The plaintiffs claim that they were fired for expressing anti-LGBTQ+ views, which they say was an act of religious discrimination.
The women are represented by the right-wing “religious freedom” legal organization First Liberty Institute.
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“You cannot be fired because your employer does not like your religious beliefs,” Stephanie Taub, the group’s senior counsel, said after the reversal.
Alaska Airlines claims religious beliefs were not at issue.
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The case stems from posts the flight attendants made to the company’s employee intranet after the airline announced its support for the Equality Act in Congress. The Equality Act would add gender identity and sexual orientation to existing federal civil rights legislation, banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in employment, credit, housing, and other areas.
Plaintiff Lacey Smith wrote in response, “As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?”
A second flight attendant, Marli Brown, posted her own claim that the Equality Act would infringe on women’s rights, enable sexual predators, and was “endangering the Church” and “encouraging suppression of religious freedom.”
Alaska Airlines responded by deleting both posts and affirming the company’s support for LGBTQ+ rights.
“We also expect our employees to live by these same values,” the airline said in a statement.
Smith and Brown were fired after an investigation for violating the airline’s anti-discrimination and harassment policy, according to court filings.
The pair sued in 2022, accusing Alaska Airlines and the flight attendants’ union of discrimination based on their Christian beliefs.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle disagreed, saying the posts were not religious in nature, and therefore the firings were not discriminatory. She threw out the case.
On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit reversed Rothstein’s order.
“It did not matter whether Brown could support her post with chapter and verse from an authoritative religious text,” Circuit Judge Daniel Bress wrote in the decision for both women.
“Nor is the religious nature of Brown’s post undermined by the fact that more than one religion may share in the same underlying views, or that the beliefs expressed could be regarded as non-religious human values.”
In this case, moreover, other circumstantial evidence beyond the evident religious grounding of Brown’s post supports the inference that Alaska may have terminated Brown based on her religious beliefs. Internal Alaska emails showed the company discussing how “[e]mployees actually do not have the right to believe that LGBTQ rights are ‘immoral.’” And the change in company policy that Brown’s post engendered came only after the CEO expressed concern about “[c]ensor[ing] people for having conservative Christian views.”
The decision means the court believes there is enough proof that the airline was motivated by the workers’ Christian beliefs when it fired them to let a jury decide whether it broke the law.
A third judge on the panel lodged a partial dissent, giving hope to the airline in their case to a jury that the firings weren’t inspired by the women’s religious beliefs.
Circuit Judge Morgan Christen said she would not have revived Smith’s discrimination claim based on her “morality” question.
“Alaska would have had to be clairvoyant to know that Smith considered the statement she posted on the company’s internal website to be an expression of her faith,” the judge wrote.
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