One of the great benefits of my job is that it allows me to get to know people and communities across the state. While there is enormous diversity, most people share a few basic values – a desire to live and to raise their families in safety and security, a desire to support themselves and their families in comfort and prosperity, and a desire to live their lives and to serve God as they see fit.
Government and elected officials have an obligation to see that those values and desires are fulfilled. We must ensure that our communities are safe and secure, and we must foster a climate that creates jobs and business opportunities.
I would like to focus on the third of the common values I identified: the desire to live one’s life and serve God as one sees fit. While that is a shared value, there are very divergent views on how to accomplish that. Government’s role is not to choose from among those views but to provide the necessary protections so that individuals and families can make their own choices.
Certainly observant Jews have made choices that are different from those made by most New Yorkers. Shabbos observance, kosher diet and yarmulkes, among other things, set them apart.
It is government’s job – and it is my job – to make sure that Orthodox Jews and other religiously observant citizens are not punished because of those choices. And it is government’s job – and my job – to protect their right to free religious expression.
During my seven years as attorney general, my office has brought a series of cases against employers who wanted to deny jobs to Orthodox Jews. Our first case was against Sears, which refused to hire several Sabbath-observant repairmen. When we began our investigation, Sears told us that Saturday was their busiest day. We subpoenaed their records, and it turned out that wasn’t true.
So we prepared a lawsuit. By the time Sears finally settled with our office – a settlement that cost them nearly $1 million – they agreed to offer jobs and to provide back pay to those Sabbath-observers they had discriminated against. More importantly, they adopted a comprehensive religious accommodation policy. That policy has served as a template for many other businesses, and those policies have protected thousands of religious workers across New York and elsewhere.
Our next case was on behalf of a Russian immigrant, who came to America to escape discrimination. When he was fired from his job as a barber at a large chain of hair salons for insisting on wearing his yarmulke at work and leaving early for Shabbos, he called my office.
Once again, we were able to achieve a settlement that not only took care of the worker who had been fired but also put into place policies that made the workplace welcoming to all employees of faith who might want to work there in the future.
We have also advocated on behalf of Sikhs who were denied employment because they clung to their requirement that they wear a beard and certain religious headgear. There too, we were able to secure a victory for the religious worker. And there were other cases as well.
Most significantly, after compiling this record of cases I was able to go to the legislature. Working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, we enacted the country’s most comprehensive workplace accommodation law. This law ensures that all employers are made aware of their legal obligations and provides all employees of faith with access to job opportunities and protection against job discrimination.
Because of the success we had with that legislation, it is my intention to propose an even more comprehensive Religious Liberty statute. This law would allow government to restrict or inhibit religious practice only when it has a compelling interest in doing so and only when there is no way to satisfy that interest without burdening religion.