The Social Security Administration (SSA) has reached a settlement with an employee who alleged that the agency violated his religious beliefs by requiring him to handle claims involving same-sex marriages, despite his conviction that marriage is defined as between one man and one woman.
The settlement was announced on Tuesday by the Christian conservative legal organization Liberty Counsel, which represented the employee in his complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The complaint stated that the SSA refused to grant a reasonable accommodation that would allow the employee to opt out of tasks that conflicted with his religious beliefs. Under the terms of the settlement, the Social Security Administration has agreed to provide 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 employee’s religious beliefs are rooted in biblical teachings that assert marriage is between one man and one woman and that God created people as “male and female,” incapable of changing their “God-given gender,” as indicated by Liberty Counsel.
The statement from Liberty Counsel further specified, “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.”
Initially, the SSA had provided the employee with an accommodation similar to what was agreed upon in the settlement, but later reversed this decision, citing the potential for “undue hardship” on the agency. This change prompted the employee to file a complaint, alleging that his employer had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination against employees based on their religious beliefs.
The settlement specifies that the 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.” This executive order establishes U.S. government policy that recognizes male and female as the only two sexes, defining sex as “an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
Moreover, the order emphasizes that the term “sex” is “not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity,’” which refers to the belief that a person can belong to a gender that does not correspond with their biological sex.
