Law360 — A coalition of Christian organizations in North Carolina urged the Fourth Circuit to uphold a gay teacher’s Title VII victory against the Catholic high school that fired him after he announced his wedding on social media.
The North Carolina Council of Churches, the Charlotte Clergy Coalition for Justice and a Presbyterian church argued in a Wednesday amicus brief that religious organizations are given sufficient leeway to employ some discriminatory hiring practices. Extending those exceptions to cover sex and race bias, the NCCC said, would do little to protect the preaching of the faith and much to damage broader societal efforts to end discrimination.
“We specifically reject the argument from the diocese and its amici that forbidding religious bodies from discriminating in the employment of nonministers burdens their free exercise of religion,” the organizations said.
Monday’s amicus brief stems from a September 2021 decision by a North Carolina federal judge to hand ex-drama teacher Lonnie Billard a pretrial win on claims that his firing was an illegal act of sex discrimination.
That decision, the groups argued, was both the correct and the just interpretation of both Charlotte Catholic High School’s rights under the First Amendment and Title VII. According to the organizations, religious groups could count on only limited immunity to religious discrimination laws to ensure that all employees believed and preached the same faith.
The amici criticized arguments that Section 702 of Title VII, which exempts religious corporations, associations and education institutions from religious discrimination rules, also exempted religious organizations from race and sex bias bans. The fact that Section 702 represented a narrow carveout for religious-based discrimination was established by the Fourth Circuit in 1985’s Rayburn v. General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists.
The amici also argued that extending religious groups’ Title VII exemptions to cover sex and race bias would do little to protect the sanctity of churches’ religious message. Nonministerial workers like Billard were not entrusted with teaching the faith, the amici said, and so their continued employment did not hamper churches’ ability to guide their congregations.
“Wayward nonministers cannot lead the congregation away from the faith,” the groups said. “We do not need complete freedom to hire and fire our nonministers.”
The amici also argued that expanding religious organizations’ freedom to discriminate on the basis of sex or race, so long as that discrimination is rooted in religious doctrine, would ironically increase entanglement between church and state. In the case of employment discrimination lawsuits, such an expansion of Title VII exemptions would force courts to examine whether faith-based arguments for termination were legitimate interpretations of the church’s beliefs.
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“That inquiry would require courts to second-guess religious groups on their motivations and on matters of faith and doctrine,” the amici said.
Representatives for the parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Billard is represented by S. Luke Largess of Tin Fulton Walker & Owen PLLC, Joshua A. Block and Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and Kristi Graunke of the ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation.
Charlotte Catholic, Mecklenburg Area Catholic Schools and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte are represented by Joshua Daniel Davey of Troutman Pepper and Luke W. Goodrich, Nicholas R. Reaves and Laura E. Wolk of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
The North Carolina Council of Churches, Charlotte Clergy Coalition for Justice and Caldwell Presbyterian Church are represented by J. Dickson Phillips III, Erik Zimmerman, Julian Wright Jr. and Garrett Steadman of Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson PA. The case is Billard v. Charlotte Catholic High School et al., case number 22-1440, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
