For years, Groff had conscientiously served the U.S. Postal Service in his role as a rural carrier associate in the towns of Quarryville and Holtwood, often covering routes for absent career carriers.
Represented by attorney Aaron Streett, Groff’s legal argument centered on overturning a precedent set nearly fifty years ago.
Streett contended that the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Trans World Airlines v. Hardison had imposed an overly lenient standard allowing employers to deny religious accommodations with minimal justification.
That ruling, which interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, permitted businesses to refuse religious accommodations whenever granting them would impose more than a de minimis, or minimal, cost.
Streett argued that lower courts had consistently applied this standard incorrectly, effectively leaving religious employees with a daily, untenable choice between observing their faith and maintaining their employment.
Title VII explicitly requires employers to accommodate the religious practices of employees unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship” to the business.
Streett’s position emphasized that the law’s plain language, rather than the Hardison precedent, should define undue hardship, aligning it with other federal statutes such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, where the threshold for hardship is measured in terms of significant difficulty or expense.
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