The Social Security Administration has settled with an employee who filed a complaint alleging the agency violated his religious beliefs by requiring him to deal with claims involving same-sex marriages despite his conviction that marriage is between a man and a woman.
In a statement published on Tuesday, the Christian conservative legal organization Liberty Counsel announced that it had reached a settlement with the Social Security Administration on behalf of an employee who had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The complaint charged that the agency refused to grant a reasonable accommodation that would have enabled him to opt out of performing tasks that violated his religious beliefs.
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Under the terms of the settlement, the Social Security Administration has agreed to grant the unnamed employee “an alternative accommodation of working with him to reassign or trade any claims/cases as needed based on his religious objections to handling claims involving same-sex marriages or changing a claimant’s sex marker on an enumeration record.”
The employees’ religious beliefs in question in the case are based on biblical teachings that define marriage as between only one man and one woman and show that God created people as “male and female” who cannot change their “God-given gender,” the legal group states.
“While the employee’s beliefs teach him to treat everyone with dignity, he requested an accommodation from having to adjudicate ‘same-sex marriage’ social security claims, change a claimant’s gender marker, use false pronouns, and use restrooms with the opposite sex,” the Liberty Counsel statement reads.
The Social Security Administration initially provided the client with an accommodation much like what was agreed to in the terms of the settlement but reversed course, citing concerns about placing an “undue hardship” on the agency. This prompted him to file a complaint alleging that his employer violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on their religious beliefs.
The settlement states: “Complainant will not be required to perform any actions in connection with his duties that would violate the terms of Executive Order 14168,” which is titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The executive order establishes it as U.S. government policy to recognize male and female as the only two sexes and defines sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
The order stressed that the term “sex” is “not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity,'” referring to the idea that it is possible for a person to belong to a gender that does not match their biological sex.
In a statement reacting to the development, Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver expressed gratitude that the settlement allows “the employee to do his job without violating his religious beliefs.” Staver added, “There simply was no hardship for the Social Security Administration in accommodating the employee’s religious beliefs.”
Staver praised Trump’s “executive order recognizing biological reality and the binary nature of sex” for “now helping protect the free exercise of religion and free speech in the federal workplace.” He asserted that “People have a right to live according to their conscience and religious beliefs.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
