Firms Fear Curbs on Religion on the Job : Worship: The EEOC is formulating guidelines on when a company’s values or motto would constitute harassment. The ACLU says it knows of few if any complaints by employees.

As a religious man, Herrick Garnsey says he operates his business on “godly, biblical principles.” The stated mission of his family-owned Ford dealership in Greeley, Colo., is to “glorify God by the process and results of providing quality products and services which meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

Now Garnsey worries that the federal government wants to turn his workplace into a religion-free zone.

In a recent letter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Garnsey voiced his concerns about emerging EEOC rules on what may be the sleeper issue of employment law in the U.S. workplace: religious harassment.

In October, the EEOC proposed new guidelines for dealing with workplace harassment based on race, color, national origin, age, disability or religion. The commission had previously issued separate guidelines for dealing with sexual harassment, which produces by far the largest number of harassment complaints the agency receives.

Now it is trying to make policies covering other forms of harassment conform to help make it easier for employers and employees to understand the rules.

Under federal law, an employer has a duty to protect an employee from what a reasonable person would deem an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.

Judging from the comments filed so far with the EEOC, dealing with the constitutional rights of free speech and freedom of religious expression may not prove easy for most employers.

Diana B. Johnston, assistant legal counsel for the EEOC, said the agency was aware of the potential constitutional questions its proposed guidelines raise. At the moment, she said, the commission is still discussing things at the staff level.

The worries of some companies about the rules are typified by ACX Technologies, another Colorado-based company, which expressed concern that under the proposed guidelines the company’s “value statement” may no longer be legal. The first item on the list of 10 stated values is “honoring God and each other.”

In a letter to the EEOC, the company said that “although our values are not religious, they are based on biblical principles and Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Any finding that the value statement amounts to religious harassment, ACX officials wrote, “would be highly detrimental to our company” and would amount to a suppression of religious freedom.

MetaWare, a self-described “Christian-centered company” in Santa Cruz, Calif., warned the EEOC that adopting the proposed guidelines would effectively ban managers from espousing Christian principles in the workplace.

Using the tests of whether a reasonable person would consider a particular form of behavior religious harassment, Franklin L. DeRemar, MetaWare’s chief executive, wrote: “A Christian employer must ask, “Would a ‘reasonable atheist’ or a ‘reasonable Muslim’ or a ‘reasonable New Age practitioner’ (all of whom fall in the definition of religion for the purpose of discrimination) find it ‘intimidating’ or ‘offensive’ to be in a workplace where Christian or biblical principles are espoused by management?”

Not all the concerns people expressed to the EEOC about the proposed guidelines came from such employers.

Cathy E. Crosson, a law professor at the University of Indiana, said she was concerned that the proposed guidelines overstep some boundaries.

Writing to the commission on behalf of Feminists for Free Expression, Crosson said: “We feel the proposed guidelines go too far and threaten to have a wide-ranging adverse impact on protected speech in workplaces where most American adults spend most of their active hours.”

Specifically, Crosson said her group was troubled by the reach of these guidelines, extending to negative stereotyping and to any written or graphic material that demonstrates or shows hostility or aversion toward an individual group on a prohibited basis.

The result, according to Crosson, would be a standard so broad “as to include classically protected, and not particularly discriminatory, speech such as a satirical feminist poster attributing social ills to white men.”

She, too, said she feared that the result would be a decision by employers to ban any and all controversial expression in the workplace to avoid potential legal liability under the religious harassment guidelines.

So far, according to officials at both the EEOC and the American Civil Liberties Union, religious harassment has not been a major problem in the workplace.

In fact, Bob Peck of the ACLU office in Washington said he was hard-pressed to find any cases involving religious harassment in a quick canvassing of ACLU offices. Peck said the potential minefields in the proposed guidelines “are the ones you always have--people being punished for exercising free speech rights.”