LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) — Gerald Groff liked his work as a postal employee in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. For years, he delivered mail and all manner of packages: a car bumper, a mini refrigerator, a 70-pound box of horseshoes for a blacksmith. But when an Amazon.com contract with the Postal Service required carriers to start delivering packages on Sundays, Groff balked. A Christian, he told his employers that he couldn’t deliver packages on the Lord’s Day.
Now Groff’s dispute with the Post Office has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which will consider his case Tuesday. Lower courts have sided with the Post Office, which says Groff’s demand for Sundays off meant extra work for other employees and caused tension. Groff, for his part, argues employers can too easily reject employees’ requests for religious accommodations, and if he wins, that could change.
“We really can’t go back and change what happened to me,” said Groff, who ultimately quit his job over the Sunday shifts. But he says that other people “shouldn’t have to choose between their job and their faith.”
Groff’s case involves Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination in employment. The law requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would be an “undue hardship” for the business.
Groff grew up in Lancaster County, where he attended Mennonite schools and lived in a home across the street from his grandparents’ farm. His grandfather’s death around the time he graduated from high school was a turning point for him, he said, and helped motivate him to work as a missionary. While he has a college degree in biology, over the years he has gone on eight mission trips lasting anywhere from two months to two years that took him to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
He did different jobs in between but in 2012 he found a job at the Post Office, regularly filling in as a mail carrier when other carriers were off or sick.
“I just really enjoyed the job from the very beginning. You get to be out in the countryside, in the fresh air … It’s a beautiful place to live and work and I just really enjoyed it and planned to make a career of it unless God called me back to the mission field somewhere,” said Groff of his job as a rural carrier associate.
As a fill-in mail carrier he ultimately learned 22 different routes, which he would drive in his Honda CR-V, hitting 500 to 800 mailboxes a day. Eventually, he hoped to become a regular mail carrier, with a set route of his own.
Soon after Groff joined the Post Office, however, it signed a contract with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. And about four years into the job Groff was told he’d have to start working his share of Sunday shifts. Groff said no. Sunday, he says, is “a day we come together as Christian believers and we honor the Lord’s Day.”
“And so to give that up, to deliver Amazon packages would be to give up everything that we believe in,” Groff said.
