Estate of Thornton v. Calder, Inc. (1985)
Supreme Court Decisions on Religious Liberty
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Background Information
Connectictut had amended its Sunday closing laws to say that no employee could be required to work on his or her chosen day of worship. The law appears to have been crafted as a good-faith attempt to promote the free exercise of religion and avoid the kind of religious discrimination that had been upheld in the McGowan and Braunfeld cases twenty-four years earlier.
Donald E. T hornton was a Presbyterian who claimed Sunday as his day of worship. But his employer, Caldor, required that all managers like him work at least one Sunday each month.
When Thornton told his employer that he could no longer work on Sundays he was transferred into a clerical position - a demotion in rank and salary. The employer had rejected an offer to work in another non-supervisory role at a lower salary or to be transferred to a managerial position at a store that was closed on Sundays.
Just two days after his transfer, Thornton quit his job and filed a grievance against Caldor, arguing that Connecticut law stipulated that no employee could be forced to work on their Sabbath.
Court Decision
With the majority opinion writen by Chief Justice Burger, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Connecticut's law was unconstitutional because it advanced a particular religious practice.
Caldor had argued that the law violated the Establishment Clause because it gave each employee the absolute right to impose their particular day of worship on employers and other employees. The Court substantially agreed with this claim:
The State thus commands that Sabbath religious concerns automatically control over all secular interests in the workplace. ... The employer and others must adjust their affairs to the command of the State whenever the statute is invoked by an employee
...the statute goes beyond having an incidental or remote effect of advancing religion. The statute has a primary effect that impermissibly advances a particular religious practice.
As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in his opening:
Under the Religion Clauses, Government must guard against activity that impinges on religious freedom, and must take pains not to compel people to act in the name of religion.
Significance
This decision held that laws which endorse a specific religious practice, like obseving a Sabbath, are not permitted.
It was not relevant that Connecticut had allowed employees to obey varying Sabbath days, even though this meant that they were not endorsing a particular religious faith - the mere act of endorsing religion generally was sufficient to constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Thus, theis Supreme Court decision essentially holds that violations of the separation of church and state do not happen simply when the government supports or endorses some particular religion or religious practice - instead, they also occur when religion in general is supported or endorsed.
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