"Gerald E. Groff is a devout evangelical Christian and former missionary who settled into a job with the U.S. Postal Service in 2012 after years of overseas religious work.
“Sometimes you just have to take the job that comes along,” he told an interviewer. One benefit, from his perspective, was that, as the saying goes, while neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night keeps Postal Service couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, those rounds generally did not occur on Sundays.
That allowed Groff to keep the Sabbath. But then Amazon came along with a big contract in 2013 to have the Postal Service help deliver packages, including on Sundays. That would eventually lead to a lawsuit and a case to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday about when employers must grant work accommodations to religious employees.
Groff, who was a rural letter carrier working out of the Quarryville, Pennsylvania, post office, at first avoided Sunday shifts with the cooperation of his boss.
“The postmaster had been accommodating me for about a year, just in-house,” Groff said in the interview posted on the website of the legal organization representing him, First Liberty Institute of Plano, Texas. “She was willing to not schedule me and not make waves. And then all of a sudden, I guess, I assume she got pressure from above her to change things. And she told me in some rather unkind words, either do it my way, or hit the road.”
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This article was originally posted in the The ABA Journal
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