Testimony on Pennsylvania SB1306: No Additional Protections for Religious Freedom Are Necessary if State Adds Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to Its Human Relations Law
July 13, 2016
Access a .pdf of Professor Franke's Testimony, here
Professor Katherine Franke, Faculty Director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, was invited to testify before the Pennsylvania Senate’s Labor and Industry Committee on the need to include greater protections for religious liberty in a bill that would add Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to Its Human Relations Law. She argues that current language contained in Pennsylvania’s Human Relations Act, the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions, and Pennsylvania’s Religious Freedom Protection Act, provide robust protections for the religious liberty rights of faith-based employers, and as such no additional language is needed in SB 1306 to protect employers’ rights to the free exercise of religion.
Indeed, some of the language contained in amendments to companion bills previously pending before the Pennsylvania legislature risks building into the Commonwealth’s Human Relations Act an overly-solicitous accommodation of religious preferences in a manner that could create a violation of the Establishment Clause. An additional accommodation of religious belief, such as that contained in A08770 offered to SB 1307 in the Senate Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, “A08770,” is therefore unnecessary and, moreover, risks unsettling a well-considered balance set by the Pennsylvania legislature and courts between religious liberty and other equally fundamental rights. By creating a religious accommodation that would meaningfully harm other Pennsylvanians, A08770 conflicts with established First Amendment doctrine.
