Court Opinion

ID: 9491526
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:16:29.653003+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:47.762874
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Chief Judge,
concurring.
It is a matter of judgment whether to base the decision of an appeal on a broad ground, on a narrow ground, or on both, when both types of ground are available. If the judges are dubious about the broad ground, then they will do well to decide only on the narrow ground; but if they are confident of the broad ground, they should base decision on that ground (as well as on the narrow ground, if equally confident of it) in order to maximize the value of the decision in guiding the behavior of persons seeking to comply with the law. One of the most important things that appellate courts do is to formulate rules of law. They would formulate very few rules, and leave the law in a state of considerable and avoidable uncertainty, if they always chose to decide a case on the narrowest possible ground. It is true that the broader the ground, the more likely it is to sweep in cases that the judges cannot perfectly foresee, and this argues for caution in deciding cases on broad grounds, because there is greater risk of error, and for a willingness to carve exceptions as new cases imperfectly foreseen arise. But I think that we could prudently have gone further in this case than the majority opinion does to clarify the law governing the duty of public-safety agencies to accommodate the religious beliefs of their employees, rather than leave the law in a state of uncertainty which the majority opinion may actually increase.
*779The ground on which my colleagues have based decision is narrow — that the city made a reasonable effort to accommodate Officer Rodriguez’s religious beliefs. It is convincing, but we would be doing a big favor for the bench and bar of this circuit, and for its police and fire departments, and with little risk of error, if we made clear that police officers and firefighters have no right under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to recuse themselves from having to protect persons of whose activities they disapprove for religious (or any other) reasons. Mr. Rodriguez, a Chicago police officer, claims, I have no reason to doubt sincerely, that it violates his religious principles to guard abortion clinics. He is entitled to his view. He is not entitled to demand that his police duties be altered to conform to his view any more than a volunteer member of the armed forces is entitled to demand that he be excused from performing military duties that conflict with his religious faith (I specify “volunteer” because the claim of a conscripted soldier is stronger, see Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333, 344, 90 S.Ct. 1792, 26 L.Ed.2d 308 (1970); United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 185-87, 85 S.Ct. 850, 13 L.Ed.2d 733 (1965)), or than a firefighter is entitled to demand that he be entitled to refuse to fight fires in the places of worship of religious sects that he regards as Satanic. The objection to recusal in all of these cases is not the inconvenience to the police department, the armed forces, or the fire department, as the case may be, though that might be considerable in some instances. The objection is to the loss of public confidence in governmental protective services if the public knows that its protectors are at liberty to pick and choose whom to protect.
The public knows that its protectors have a private agenda; everyone does. But it would like to think that they leave that agenda at home when they are on duty — that Jewish policemen protect neo-Nazi demonstrators, that Roman Catholic policemen protect abortion clinics, that Black Muslim policemen protect Christians and Jews, that fundamentalist Christian policemen protect noisy atheists and white-hating Rastafarians, that Mormon policemen protect Scientologists, and that Greek-Orthodox policemen of Serbian ethnicity protect Roman Catholic Croats. We judges certainly want to think that U.S. Marshals protect us from assaults and threats without regard to whether, for example, we vote for or against the pro-life position in abortion cases.
All that an employer must show to avoid liability for religious ■ discrimination in employment is that “he is unable to reasonably accommodate to an employee’s or prospective employee’s religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(j). The Chicago Police Department reasonably accommodated Rodriguez by allowing him to use his accumulated seniority to transfer to a district that does not have an abortion clinic in it. The only inconvenience to Rodriguez is that he would miss the “camaraderie” of the Fourteenth District. This is a trivial inconvenience. But I do not think that the Department was required to accommodate Rodriguez’s religious aversion to protecting abortion clinics even to the limited extent that it did. The importance of public confidence in the neutrality of its protectors is so great that a police department or fire department or equivalent public-safety agency that decides not to allow recusal by its employees should be able to plead “undue hardship” and thus escape any duty of accommodation. Ryan v. Department of Justice, 950 F.2d 458, 462 (7th Cir.1991); Beadle v. City of Tampa, 42 F.3d 633, 637-38 (11th Cir.1995); United States v. City of Albuquerque, 545 F.2d 110, 114 (10th Cir.1976); cf. Jones v. City of Gary, 57 F.3d 1435, 1442 (7th Cir.1995).
Both Ansonia Board of Education v. Philbrook, 479 U.S. 60, 67, 107 S.Ct. 367, 93 L.Ed.2d 305 (1986), and Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63, 84, 97 S.Ct. 2264, 53 L.Ed.2d 113 (1977), hold that anything more than a de minimis cost to the employer is undue hardship within the meaning of Title VII. It is undue hardship in spades when the necessary accommodation would strike a body blow to the employer’s business. When the business of the employer is to protect the public safety, the maintenance of public confidence in the neutrality of the protectors is central to effective performance, and the erosion of that confidence by recognition of a right of recusal by public-*780safety officers would so undermine the agency’s effective performance as to constitute an undue hardship within the meaning of the statute. Although the principle that public-safety officers have no right to pick and choose on religious or other personal grounds among the people whom they protect applies to all police officers employed by any public police force, including the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, and the Secret Service, and to all firefighters employed by public fire departments, I would reserve the case we put at argument of a fire department paramedic who refuses on religious grounds to obey an order by his superiors to withdraw life support from a patient. That would be a case of a public-safety officer insisting on protecting all members of the public rather than refusing to protect some of them. It would thus be a different case from the present one and we need not decide today how it ought to be decided.
Our decision in Ryan, which upheld the discharge of an FBI agent who refused on religious grounds to investigate antiwar activists, comes so close to enunciating the principle that I am urging that the failure of the majority opinion even to cite that ease may be taken as expressing doubts about the validity of the principle. I hope not, but it is another reason why deciding this case on the broader ground would serve to dispel uncertainty.