Harassment Law Is Going Amok : Religion is only the latest of many protected categories and they’re breaking down what’s left of our sense of community.
Will office Christmas parties be outlawed by the year 2000? Will store clerks be able to sue retailers for making them listen to piped-in renditions of “Silent Night” and “O, Little Town of Bethlehem?”
Religion may soon be as illegal in the workplace as it is in the public schools. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed guidelines extending the prohibition on sexual harassment to other protected categories: race, color, national origin, age, disability and, yes, religion.
The idea is not really new. Religious-harassment complaints have been brought under existing law, which the EEOC claims the guidelines “were intended merely to explain and interpret.” But such cases are rare and usually extreme.
The new guidelines expand the idea of harassment. They impose the equivalent of the “reasonable woman” standard. Whether an action constitutes harassment depends on the viewpoint of a reasonable member of the offended group--the reasonable atheist or Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness. And harassment need not be deliberate; it can be anything that has the effect of “creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.”
Religious employees and business owners fear that the EEOC will force them to hide their beliefs. Evangelical Christians, in particular, worry that the EEOC is making it illegal for them to encourage co-workers or employees to accept Jesus as their savior. Small businesses that hold voluntary prayer meetings or post inspirational signs with religious messages are afraid those actions would be illegal.
The safest policy may be a religion-free workplace. As Michael K. Whitehead, general counsel to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, told a Senate hearing, “Employers trying to avoid lawsuits want a clear-cut, simple rule which can be understood and obeyed by all employees, whether high school drop-outs or Harvard MBAs . . . Their bottom line is to find a policy that will help them stay out of court.”
But federal law also requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices. So if a company lets evangelical Christian employees proselytize on the job, it can be sued for creating a “hostile environment” for non-Christians. And if it forbids proselytizing, it can be sued for failing to accommodate evangelical Christians.
Or consider the Christmas season, in which workers are bombarded with songs, slogans, artwork and numerous other expressions of faith. This campaign of harassment seems OK only because we are used to it. And, notes the EEOC, “Recent case law . . . emphasizes the importance of considering the perspective of the victim of the harassment rather than adopting notions of acceptable behavior that may prevail in a particular workplace.”
Just because shipyard workers have always posted explicit pinups doesn’t get their employer off the hook for sexual harassment. And just because stores have always piped in “O Holy Night” doesn’t mean that Christmas carols won’t spark a suit. The same holds true for profanity that offends Christians. After all, says the EEOC, employees can “challenge a hostile or abusive work environment even if the harassment is not targeted specifically at them.”
Some members of Congress, led by Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) and Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), want the EEOC to delete religious harassment from its guidelines. But why should religion get special treatment?
Harassment law in general has run amok. The federal government is centrally planning the corporate culture of millions of wildly different businesses. It is prohibiting free expression and turning the private workplace into an extension of the public sphere. Religion is only part of the picture.
Massive workplace regulation, down to the details of wall decorations, is busting up communities, destroying the institutions that stand between individuals and the state. It is telling entrepreneurs that they cannot create businesses that reflect their personalities and beliefs or hire workers who want to work in that atmosphere. And all the while, American intellectuals go around mourning the loss of community.
Like the people who write the harassment laws, I prefer to work in a secular atmosphere, where religion is appreciated but not embraced. But forcing every workplace to provide the cultural environment preferred by intellectuals is profoundly intolerant. It is itself a campaign of harassment, backed by the power of the state.
