Title VII; Religious discrimination regarding COVID -19 policy; “Failure to accommodate”; 42 USC § 2000e-(j); Whether the conflict was “sincerely based on a religious belief,” rather than on “some other motivation”

In this Title VII religious discrimination/failure-to-accommodate case, the court held that plaintiff-former employee (DeVore) failed to show any conflict between her religion and defendant-former employer’s (the University of Kentucky) test-or-vaccinate policy (the Policy). Thus, it affirmed summary judgment for defendant. When the University announced that employees were to return to campus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeVore, a department manager, unsuccessfully requested that she be allowed to return only three days a week and remain home two days. When the University implemented the Policy, she made several attempts to obtain a religious exemption, but the University denied her requests. She then “submitted a religious accommodation request and filed a complaint of religious discrimination.” The University conducted an investigation, denied her request, and issued a letter directing her to begin complying with the Policy. It “clarified that DeVore could comply with the Policy through oral swab or saliva testing in lieu of the nasal swab tests to which she had previously objected.” She eventually retired and filed this suit. The court explained that in these cases, a court must “ensure the asserted conflict is ‘sincerely based on a religious belief,’ rather than ‘some other motivation’, . . . and that the belief actually conflicts with a workplace policy[.]” The court noted that DeVore’s prima facie case had to “establish a religious conflict with each of the testing options the University offered—nasal, oral swab, and saliva.” It determined that her “religious opposition to the Policy flows almost entirely from her objections to nasal PCR testing and vaccination, objections she raised before the University informed her that she could comply with the Policy via oral swab or saliva tests, and she fails to account for these alternatives. Her invasiveness objection responds only to nasal swab testing, her manipulation objection ignores testing as a bona fide substitute for vaccinating, and her coercion objection doubles down on her manipulation objection, supplementing it with only her ‘personal’ characterization of mandatory testing as inequitable and unfair.” While her objections may have satisfied Title VII’s pleading requirements they did not establish at summary judgment “a conflict between DeVore’s religion and the Policy. DeVore’s Title VII claim fails with them.”