Target, Religious Freedom and the CRA

Target is now claiming that their allowing pharmacists to interpose their reactionary moralism between customers and their prescriptions is mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for their employees’ religious beliefs. Fortunately, the intraweb provides us with a lot of sharp law-talkin’ people, and The Happy Feminist and iocaste demolish this nonsense. As The Supreme Court has interpreted it, the CRA requires employers to make only de minimis accommodations; employers are not, of course, required to make accommodations that would impose a hardship on their business. THF makes a useful distinction between a policy that if multiple pharmacists are on duty the one without moral objections fulfill the prescription–which is reasonable and does not affect the business significantly–with a policy that will force customers to go elsewhere, which obviously is not. And, of course, this is pretty obvious; you will not be surprised to find out that, say, companies that test shellfish recipes are not, in fact, legally forced to provide no-show jobs for Orthodox Jews. Again, you do not have a civil right to refuse to perform core functions of your job, and if the CRA were interpreted the way Target claims to it would be self-evidently unworkable.

So, Target cannot hide behind the CRA; its policy is its own. eRobin sees one reason why they may be caving to the wingnuts.