AG Labrador Defends Employees’ Religious Freedom in Supreme Court Brief
BOISE, ID — Attorney General Raúl Labrador led a coalition of 18 states, Puerto Rico, and the Arizona Legislature in filing an amicus brief on September 16 urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center and reverse a Ninth Circuit ruling that lets courts decide which sincerely held beliefs count as religious.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sherry Detwiler asked her employer, Mid-Columbia Medical Center, for religious accommodation from its nasal-swab testing requirement, based on her religious convictions. Detwiler also offered an alternative method of testing. The medical center denied her request and fired her. Without questioning her sincerity, the Ninth Circuit ruled that her belief was not religious at all. The Court called her belief a secular medical opinion because it rested on a broad religious principle and required her to weigh facts about the testing.
Idaho and the coalition argue that courts have no authority to decide which beliefs qualify as religious based on whether they are broad or narrow, or whether applying them requires the believer to consider facts on the ground. That approach strips protection from Americans whose faith does not fit a particular model of religious practice. The Supreme Court has long held that courts must not determine the place of a particular belief within a religion.
“People of faith don’t leave their beliefs at home when they go to work,” said Attorney General Labrador. “Every day, Idahoans apply the principles of their faith to real decisions on the job, guided by scripture, prayer, and conscience. The Ninth Circuit has now given judges the power to decide which of those convictions count as religion, and that ruling binds every federal court in Idaho. No judge has the authority to tell a believer what his faith requires. I’m asking the Supreme Court to take this case and restore the protection Congress wrote into law.”
The Fourth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion on September 1st in a similar case, Wilkins-Bailey v. Essity Professional Hygiene North America LLC. When federal appellate courts arrive at opposite conclusions, it becomes an issue that only the Supreme Court can resolve for legal consistency across the nation.
Read the brief here.
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