Native Amerian Hospitals on Tribal Land and EEOC antidiscrimination laws My question is regarding Native American Hospitals located on tribal reservation land (Navajo Nation in AZ). The hospital is not IHS run, it is designation self-determination. However, it receives federal funding, participates in Medicaid/Medicare and is subject to CMS rules/audits. Would this type of hospital also be subject to EEOC antidiscrimination laws? They have allowed religious exemptions to vaccines until 9/23/22. They have also referred multiple times to title VII. However, they required employees to provide letters from pastors to verify sincerely held religious beliefs with regard to requesting exemption. On the other hand, they also claim that because they are a sovereign nation, they don't have to follow the Federal laws. HR has now stated that they have updated their policy and eliminated such religious exemptions per &quot;CMS requirements.&quot; However, according to the latest information on the CMS site regarding the IFC (latest dated 4/2022), employers are not required to eliminate religious exemptions. In fact, that memo states that &quot;The COVID-19 vaccination requirements and policies and procedures required by this IFC must comply with applicable federal non-discrimination and civil rights laws and protections, including providing reasonable accommodations to individuals who are legally entitled to them because they have a disability or sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, or observations that conflict with the vaccination requirement. More information on federal non-discrimination and civil rights laws is available here: https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-about-covid-19-and-ada-rehabilitation-act-and-other-eeo-laws. Would the hospital be subject to EEOC rules? Can the hospital legally refuse to consider religious exemptions or could this be considered religious discrimination?
42 USC 2000e–2 prohibits various discriminatory employment practices, for example (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin But furthermore, (i) Nothing contained in this subchapter shall apply to any business or enterprise on or near an Indian reservation with respect to any publicly announced employment practice of such business or enterprise under which a preferential treatment is given to any individual because he is an Indian living on or near a reservation. In Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 the Supreme Court discussed the rationale of Indian Preference policies which predated anti-discrimination legislation, concluding that Congress did not intent to repeal those laws, concluding that &quot;As long as the special treatment of Indians can be tied rationally to the fulfillment of Congress' unique obligation toward Indians, such legislative judgments will not be disturbed&quot;, and considered certain kinds of discrimination to be &quot;an employment criterion designed to further the cause of Indian self-government&quot;. See also EEOC v. Navajo Health Foundation-Sage Memorial Hospital, where an employment discrimination suit against a Navajo hospital was dismissed on this basis. Also note the word &quot;employer&quot; relevant to discrimination laws is given a special definition in 42 USC 2000e(b): The term “employer” means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year, and any agent of such a person, but such term does not include (1) the United States, a corporation wholly owned by the Government of the United States, an Indian tribe, or any department or agency of the District of Columbia subject by statute... To the extent that the situation you are asking about relates to employment discrimination, it would seem that the hospital is indeed exempt from 42 USC 20002-2(a). However, relevant details are missing.
united-states Since &quot;lying&quot; is not a clearly-defined legal concept, we need to look at a specific kind of (non)statement. Some lies are plainly illegal, for instance saying in the context of a sale that &quot;this column is made of pressure-treated lumber&quot; when in fact it is make of sand and Elmer's glue is fraud. A receptionist being told to say &quot;Mr. Smith is at a conference in New York&quot; when he is actually drunk in Chicago is a legal lie. Now the question is, who can refuse to tell this lie (without suffering employment consequences), and on what grounds? Generally, in the US you can be ordered to tell such a legal lie as part of your employment duties. If I refuse, I can be fired. If you refuse, you can request a reasonable accommodation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since you proffer that your religion requires you to tell the truth / forbids you from telling a falsehood. If you make a claim for a religious accommodation, then the issue becomes whether there is a reasonable alternative. Such an accommodation might be that you instead say &quot;Mr. Smith is not available&quot;; or perhaps someone else who does not have a religious objection will be forced to act as receptionist for the day. This is specifically about religion. &quot;I don't want to&quot; or any similar idea does not provide protection against being fired. However, bear in mind that there is no official list of approved religions and their beliefs which the courts will refer to in determining whether your refusal was protected. If you claim &quot;As a Pastafarian, I can't lie&quot;, the courts will not accept the premise that declaring yourself to be Pastafarian (a parody &quot;religion&quot;) is valid. The available governmental resources on the fine line between general moral code and religious beliefs are quite sparse.
There are exemptions, and "justifications", in 24 CFR 100. The exemption is 100.10: (c) Nothing in this part, other than the prohibitions against discriminatory advertising, applies to: (1) The sale or rental of any single family house by an owner, provided the following conditions are met: (i) The owner does not own or have any interest in more than three single family houses at any one time. (ii) The house is sold or rented without the use of a real estate broker, agent or salesperson or the facilities of any person in the business of selling or renting dwellings. So such a restriction could be allowed if e.g. you live in the house and rent only a few rooms, or a single family home marketed and managed in the right way. There is also an exemption for religious organizations and private clubs allowing rental to members only. 100.500 lays the groundwork for disparate impact hot water. It says: (a) A practice has a discriminatory effect where it actually or predictably results in a disparate impact on a group of persons or creates, increases, reinforces, or perpetuates segregated housing patterns because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin. So only renting to students in a particular seminary would most likely have a disparate impact. There is, however, the possibility of justifying the policy, following 100.500: (b) (1) A legally sufficient justification exists where the challenged practice: (i) Is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests of the respondent, with respect to claims brought under 42 U.S.C. 3612, or defendant, with respect to claims brought under 42 U.S.C. 3613 or 3614; and (ii) Those interests could not be served by another practice that has a less discriminatory effect. (2) A legally sufficient justification must be supported by evidence and may not be hypothetical or speculative. The burdens of proof for establishing each of the two elements of a legally sufficient justification are set forth in paragraphs (c)(2) and (c)(3) of this section. So let's say that the offended party has made the case that the practice will have a discriminatory effect, then the accused can set forth the aforementioned justification: (c)(2) Once the charging party or plaintiff satisfies the burden of proof set forth in paragraph (c)(1) of this section, the respondent or defendant has the burden of proving that the challenged practice is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests of the respondent or defendant. (c3)(3) If the respondent or defendant satisfies the burden of proof set forth in paragraph (c)(2) of this section, the charging party or plaintiff may still prevail upon proving that the substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests supporting the challenged practice could be served by another practice that has a less discriminatory effect. The crux of the matter is having a "substantial, legitimate nondiscriminatory interest", i.e. why would you want to rent to only seminary students.
It is not legal to give false responses on such a declaration. The point of anti-discrimination laws is that they say when it is legal vs. not legal to discriminate against an employee, and Alex is expected to have faith in the legal system to protect his legal rights. Dissatisfaction with the outcome of the law may be understandable, but still does not legally justify falsifying information given to an employer. In certain cases (look for the fine print and mentions of "penalty of perjury") you can be fined and imprisoned for lying. More commonly, your employment can be terminated when you are discovered. You may also be held liable for consequences of such lies. Your employer's health insurance contract might require truthful and accurate reporting of medical facts and a lie about your condition could result in termination of coverage.
Others have mentioned Title IX, the federal law that generally prohibits sex discrimination at federally funded educational institutions, 20 US 1681 et seq. However, there is specific permission for single-sex housing in 20 USC 1686: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in this chapter, nothing contained herein shall be construed to prohibit any educational institution receiving funds under this Act, from maintaining separate living facilities for the different sexes. As to your &quot;in this day and age&quot;, this particular section of the law has not been amended since it was first passed in 1972. If you think it should be, you can certainly write to your members of Congress and tell them so. However, you say you attend a &quot;Christian&quot; college. Religious schools get an even broader exemption from Title IX, as Michael Seifert also mentioned. 20 USC 1681 (a) (3): This section shall not apply to an educational institution which is controlled by a religious organization if the application of this subsection would not be consistent with the religious tenets of such organization; So even if 20 USC 1686 were repealed, if your college determined that mixed-gender housing was &quot;inconsistent with its religious tenets&quot;, they would probably be allowed to continue having single-gender housing anyway.
The first thing to note is that your question is kind of the wrong way around. US states are sovereign and generally have the ability to make any kind of laws they want, unless they violate some specific tenet of federal law or the US Constitution. You suggest, for instance, that arguments which are "culturally founded" have no place in the law, but that's just your opinion, and there isn't generally anything preventing a state from making law based on such things, should its elected legislature see fit to do so. (Indeed, one could argue that nearly all laws are in some sense "culturally founded", since they are based on some notion of what kind of behavior is or is not appropriate, and those tend to be culturally based.) So legally speaking, the states aren't, by default, obligated to give any sort of justification for the laws they made. The burden of proof is on the other side. Someone seeking to overturn those laws would have to convince a court that the laws violated some specific provision of the Constitution (or another superior law). If they couldn't convince a court of this, the law would stand. From what I have read, before the US Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the previous precedent was set in 1971 by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Baker v. Nelson. The decision itself is quite short and is worthwhile to read. Quoting Wikipedia's summary, the plaintiffs claimed that Minnesota's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples violated several provisions of the US Constitution: First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association), Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause). The Minnesota court determined that none of the plaintiffs' objections were valid. Again, I'll refer you to the decision for the details, but the court mainly focused on their Fourteenth Amendment arguments (the others may have been addressed by the trial court, whose opinion I can't find online). They wrote: The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, like the due process clause, is not offended by the state's classification of persons authorized to marry. There is no irrational or invidious discrimination. They specifically rejected any analogy to bans on interracial marriage, which had been held unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia: But in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex. Baker appealed to the US Supreme Court, but his appeal was dismissed "for want of a substantial federal question," without any further explanation. (Nobody quite seems to understand what they meant by that, but here is an essay discussing the situation in a little more depth.) The effect of the dismissal was that the Minnesota court's decision became binding precedent upon the whole nation - laws against same-sex marriage didn't violate those provisions of the Constitution. And that was how matters stood for 44 years until Obergefell. (Of course, there was nothing to stop individual states from deciding to allow same-sex marriage, and some in fact did so in the meantime.) You have suggested that laws against same-sex marriage were religiously motivated. This might suggest an argument that they would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in Baker didn't raise that point, so it wasn't considered in the Minnesota court's opinion. I don't know whether any other courts have considered it; no such argument was mentioned in the opinion in Obergefell.
Businesses are not required to do what the card says, they are required to do what the card-holder says, to the extend that what the card holder says relates to giving or denying consent to be vaccinated. Since they don't vaccinate people who are unconscious, consent will always be directly obtained from the patient and the card has absolutely no effect. Also, control subjects are selected at random and the subject does not know what group they are in. Possession of such a card therefore has zero scientific effect.
The ADA continues to apply, and an employer cannot simply withdraw an accommodation on a whim. You have established a medical need for an accommodation, and your employer must offer an accommodation if a rewasonable one is available. The EEOC page giving guidelines on COVID says (in section K.1) The federal EEO laws do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19, subject to the reasonable accommodation provisions of Title VII and the ADA and other EEO considerations discussed below. These principles apply if an employee gets the vaccine in the community or from the employer. In some circumstances, Title VII and the ADA require an employer to provide reasonable accommodations for employees who, because of a disability or a sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance, do not get vaccinated for COVID-19, unless providing an accommodation would pose an undue hardship on the operation of the employer’s business. Section k.6 further says: An employee with a disability who does not get vaccinated for COVID-19 because of a disability must let the employer know that he or she needs an exemption from the requirement or a change at work, known as a reasonable accommodation. To request an accommodation, an individual does not need to mention the ADA or use the phrase “reasonable accommodation.” ... Employers and employees typically engage in a flexible, interactive process to identify workplace accommodation options that do not impose an undue hardship (significant difficulty or expense) on the employer. This process may include determining whether it is necessary to obtain supporting medical documentation about the employee’s disability. ... The ADA requires that employers offer an available accommodation if one exists that does not pose an undue hardship, meaning a significant difficulty or expense. See 29 C.F.R. 1630.2(p). Employers are advised to consider all the options before denying an accommodation request. It is hard to see how having an employee get frequent COVID tests imposes an &quot;undue hardship&quot; on the employer, as it should impose little or no difficulty or expense on the employer. It seems unlikely that an employer who has accepted such testing as a reasonable accommodation would change its position and seek to deny that accommodation. Even if it did, any such employer still has a legal obligation to consider what would constitute a reasonable accommodation, and to inform the employee what it would accept as a reasonable accommodation before undertaking to terminate employment. If the employer insists that a vaccination is absolutely essential and no alternative will be tolerated (highly unlikely, even hospitals are not taking that position) it must offer the employee a chance to comply or to challenge the decision. Until the employer indicates that the accommodation of regular testing will no longer be accepted, there should be no reason to take significant medical risks to meet an issue that has not in fact arisen.