The statement that they would be required to be in rooms with unclothed women walking around is a misstatement. Whitman, it happens, is the Orthodox rabbi at Yale. Of course, in general the right still opposes the impulse toward group and ethnic separatism, the turning of quotidian grievances into civil rights cases, and the continual expansion of the sensitivity industry. In recent years several public-interest litigation groups have sprung up to advance the interests of religious believers, sometimes at the expense of others' liberty. The Charlottesville, Virginia-based Rutherford Institute files lawsuits galore urging courts to intervene in the workings of both private and public institutions to expand the scope of required religious accommodation, which not incidentally shrinks the scope of those institutions' authority to run their own affairs as they see fit.
Private employers are frequent defendants in the institute's suits.
In one case reported in the Heritage Foundation's Insider Newsletter this August, Rutherford's target was the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, which has sought to regulate the kinds of banners its fans can wave from the stands. Stadium officials said the banner was against Major League Baseball policy and confiscated it. On to the Series. It even strikes me that the Reds are in much the same legal boat as the Boy Scouts, another group that uses public facilities but fails to accommodate all shades of religious belief. But apparently many others don't.