Court Opinion

ID: 9497734
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:58:44.304416+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:23.121632
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the order denying rehearing en banc:
Judge Kleinfeld’s allegory to the infamous slaying of Archbishop (now Saint) Thomas Becket puzzles me. Judge Klein-feld’s point seems to be that lawsuits of the type brought by Elvig breach the “ ‘wall of separation’ between church and state,” Kleinfeld dissent at 798, in the following way: Churches will have a reason to fire ministers like Will Ackles because they fear the cost and burden of civil liability, rather than because of their performance as ministers. See id. at 803. And the ease of bringing such lawsuits, Judge Kleinfeld implies, can burden religion just as surely as direct government regulation (represented in its extreme form by Murder in the Cathedral).
While I oppose killing archbishops, either directly or softly with lawsuits, I don’t understand how Judge Kleinfeld’s approach helps. Suppose Judge Kleinfeld is right, and it would violate religious liberty for Henry Plantagenet to rid himself of Becket by getting Elvig’s ur-grandmother to sue him on a trumped-up harassment claim. It seems to me that Henry could achieve the same effect — through the same means — by getting a church janitor or bookkeeper to bring the same claim. Yet the latter kind of suit is clearly not barred by the ministerial exception, which only applies to those “serving the function of ministers.” Bollard v. Cal. Province of the Soc’y of Jesus, 196 F.3d 940, 947 (9th Cir.1999); see also EEOC v. Roman Catholic Diocese, 213 F.3d 795, 800 (4th Cir.2000).
Suits by parishioners or non-ministerial employees resting on generally applicable law are just as likely (if not more likely, see Fletcher concurrence at 792) to affect the incentives to hire, fire and supervise ministers as suits by clergy: If Chaucer’s Friar and his house are held liable for *796injuring a barmaid with his knives while collecting alms in a tavern, this may well cost the Friar his job and encourage mendicant orders to send out teetotalers. If the Monk and his monastery can be sued because he shot the Manciple while hunting for dinner, this will make the abbot less eager to accept monks with bows, even though they meet all the religious criteria for ordination. And this is the likely consequence whether the victim was the Knight, the Miller, the Wife of Bath or a fellow religious official like the Prioress.
What, then, makes Elvig’s case so special? Judge Kleinfeld suggests that workplace sexual harassment, unlike other causes of action, falls within the ministerial exception because it is a species of employment discrimination and laws regulating it thus go to the heart of employer-employee relations. See Kleinfeld dissent at 804 & n. 37. But this is not a satisfactory answer: If sexual harassment suits are to fall within the First Amendment exception to Title VII, it must be because of the presence or absence of First Amendment concerns, see Fletcher concurrence at 790-91, not because of the body of law of their conception or what name they are baptized under. And this functional analysis is concerned not with mere effects on employment or supervision of employees, but with entanglement in internal church management. The risk of ongoing government involvement in internal processes is clear and substantial when the government interferes with actual hiring and firing, which is why Elvig cannot sue to get her job back or for wrongful termination damages. But letting Elvig recover damages for harassment does not regulate employment directly; at most, it may have a collateral effect on employment by changing the employer’s incentives to retain or remove the accused employee. As such, damages suits by employees for sexual harassment are no more intrusive than parishioners’ negligent supervision lawsuits based on molestation by priests. See Elvig v. Calvin Presbyterian Church, 375 F.3d 951, 968 & n. 12 (9th Cir.2004). Nor are they any more intrusive than run-of-the-mill intra-church lawsuits arising out of, say, on-the-job personal injuries.
Judge Kleinfeld offers a second rationale for extending the ministerial exception to lawsuits such as Elvig’s: Such suits “regulate relationships among ministers” by targeting “water cooler talk” and other “mostly verbal” conduct which, in a church, “is probably about prayer and religious doctrine, just as among lawyers it is about law.” Kleinfeld dissent at 803. This argument holds no water either because the ministerial exception is both too broad and too narrow to remedy the problem Judge Kleinfeld envisions.
As it happens, Elvig is claiming that her harasser was another minister, but that’s merely incidental. The ministerial exception applies, if at all, based on the plaintiffs status as a minister; the status of the accused harasser is irrelevant, so long as his actions can somehow be imputed to the church. See, e.g., Bollard, 196 F.3d at 945 (“The ministerial exception to Title VII ‘precludes civil courts from adjudicating employment discrimination suits by ministers against the church or religious institution employing them.’ ” (quoting EEOC v. Catholic Univ. of Am., 83 F.3d 455, 461 (D.C.Cir.1996))). The harasser could be a fellow minister, a non-ministerial church employee, a lay member of the church’s board of governors or even a member of the congregation. See Folkerson v. Circus Circus Enters., 107 F.3d 754, 756 (9th Cir.1997) (“[A]n employer may be held liable for sexual harassment on the part of a private individual ... [if it] ratifies or acquiesces in the harassment by not taking immediate and/or corrective actions when it knew or should have known of the con*797duct.”); 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11(e) (employer liability for sexual harassment by non-employees in the workplace). If a minister like Elvig were to claim sexual harassment by any of these people, her lawsuit would not implicate “water cooler talk” or other such verbal conduct “among ministers” for the simple reason that the alleged harasser would not be a minister. Yet the ministerial exception would cut off that claim just as surely as Elvig’s claim against Will Ackles. In that sense, the exception sweeps far broader than the justification Judge Kleinfeld offers for it.
For much the same reason, Judge Klein-feld’s justification is too narrow to support the rule he proposes. Judge Kleinfeld fears that the risk of liability will cause churches to “squelch[ ]” ministers who preach male supremacy or condemn “certain marital or sexual conduct ... in the hearing of a female associate pastor.” Kleinfeld dissent at 805. Yet female pastors are not the only ones who could be offended: A non-clerical employee, such as a female English teacher at a church-run elementary school, is perhaps even more likely to be offended and feel that “the environment is hostile to her work and denies her equality because of her sex.” Id. at 805. Yet the ministerial exception— which turns on the identity of the accuser, not that of the speaker — would do nothing in that case to protect the church or the minister who preaches such views. Denying Elvig her claim would thus not insulate the preacher or his employer in the long run from the consequences Judge Klein-feld colorfully catalogues in his dissent. The proper way to protect church doctrine and ministers’ speech is not by shoehorning them into a Free Exercise and Establishment Clause exception to workplace discrimination law, but by giving them the full protection of another part of the First Amendment: the Free Speech Clause. See generally Eugene Volokh, Comment, Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment, 39 UCLA L.Rev. 1791 (1992).
Even then, I might see some merit in Judge Kleinfeld’s approach if it offered the prospect that courts could avoid all direct entanglement in churchly processes — but it does not, and cannot. Since churches can invoke the ministerial exception only against those “serving the function of ministers,” see Bollard, 196 F.3d at 947, courts applying the exception have to decide at the outset who fulfills a function “important to the spiritual and pastoral mission of the church” and who doesn’t. Roman Catholic Diocese, 213 F.3d at 801 (quoting Rayburn v. Gen. Conf. of Seventh-Day Adventists, 772 F.2d 1164, 1169 (4th Cir.1985)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Various cases have properly taken a functional. approach and not insisted that the relevant party be “ordained” or a “minister” before applying the exception. See id. (citing cases involving a lay choir director, a member of a university’s canon law faculty, a non-ordained associate in pastoral care and seminary faculty members). Thus, we routinely have to ask what function is served by altar servers, choirboys, lay ministers, lay deacons, ushers, acolytes and crucifers. Rabbis are clearly, ministerial, but what about the gabbai, the shames, the cook in the synagogue’s kitchen (who may have unorthodox views about whether swordfish -is kosher)? Are mohels to be cut off from the ministerial exception altogether? What of the organizers of traditional Quaker meetings or the Mormon lay clergy? Religions vary drastically in their hierarchical and organizational structure, , and it is often a tricky business to distinguish spiritual from administrative officials and clergy from congregation. The very invocation of the ministerial exception requires us to engage in entanglement with a vengeance. To call the Bol*798lard-Elvig rale, which allows a damages suit under a generally applicable law, an unprecedented “gate” in our “ ‘wall of separation’ between church and state,” see Edeinfeld dissent at 798, is meaningless hyperbole.
Where the Bollardr-Elvig approach would simply let Title VII suits like Elvig’s go forward, Judge Kleinfeld’s approach would require continually looking into church affairs to resolve the sensitive question whether a plaintiff is ministerial and therefore subject to the ministerial exception. While the question may be an easy one in Elvig’s case, it may be quite difficult in other cases, as illustrated above. At best, then, Judge Kleinfeld swaps one entanglement for another one.
Thomas Becket himself had a different policy proposal, which could indeed insulate church decisionmaking from all secular interference: Clergymen accused of crimes could be called to account only under the authority of an ecclesiastical court, not the secular authorities. Now that’s a wall. Because we neither can nor wish to go that far, the kind of hermetic separation Judge Kleinfeld and the other dissenters envision is just not possible for religious institutions situated in the midst of our civilization. By practicing religion within our society, churches and their members necessarily undertake some of the burdens along with the benefits of civilized life. This will inevitably distort hiring and firing incentives to some degree, but it is both misguided and futile to seek to avoid all such effects.
The First Amendment does impose certain constraints on the application of general laws to churches, but showing that a class of lawsuits could have been disadvantageous to Thomas Becket isn’t enough. Though I had my doubts about Bollard at the time, I now believe that adopting a broader ministerial exception would cause more problems than it solves. The Bol-lardr-Elvig rule, which leaves the decision whether to hire or fire clergy with the religious institution, but subjects other decisions that may have a collateral effect on employment to the authority of the civil courts, strikes me as entirely workable. It is, in any event, the law we have, and nothing the dissenters say convinces me that we could come up with something better by going en banc.