The U.S. Supreme Court today in Seattle's Union Gospel Mission v. Woods, (certiorari denied, March 21, 2022) denied review, but Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, filed an opinion saying in part:
The Washington Supreme Court’s decision may warrant our review in the future, but threshold issues would make it difficult for us to review this case in this posture.
At issue was the Mission's refusal on religious grounds to hire a bisexual male who was in a same-sex relationship as a staff attorney for its legal clinic. Justice Alito said in part:
Because of such federal statutory exemptions and their state analogs, we have yet to confront whether freedom for religious employers to hire their co-religionists is constitutionally required....
But in this case the confrontation may be inevitable, as it involves an employment dispute between a religious employer and an applicant who was not hired because he disagreed with that employer’s religious views. The Washington Supreme Court expressly declined to apply its state employment law exemption for religious entities to this dispute. Instead, it held that if that state exemption applied to employment decisions beyond those involving church ministers, such an exemption would violate the Washington State Constitution’s protection for other individual rights and could become a “license to discriminate.”
