Three San Francisco Giants pitchers are facing backlash after writing a Bible passage on their Pride Night caps during a team-sponsored LGBTQ+ celebration. The players cited Genesis 9:12-16, the biblical passage describing the rainbow as God's covenant ...
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Pride Night, Bible Verses, and When Title VII Protections Collide

Three San Francisco Giants pitchers are facing backlash after writing a Bible passage on their Pride Night caps during a team-sponsored LGBTQ+ celebration. The players cited Genesis 9:12-16, the biblical passage describing the rainbow as God's covenant with humanity. Critics viewed the gesture as a deliberate rebuke of Pride Month and the LGBTQ+ community. The Giants apologized for the pain caused. Major League Baseball warned the players for violating uniform rules.

Predictably, the story has become another front in America's never-ending culture war.

But strip away the politics and outrage for a moment, and what's left is a workplace issue every employer should understand.

While the setting is a Major League Baseball clubhouse, the legal and practical issues are no different from those employers confront every day.

The Giants wanted to send a message of inclusion. The players wanted to express their religious beliefs. Those objectives collided in public.

Welcome to the modern workplace.

Many commentators are treating this controversy as a simple morality play. It isn't.

For employers, this is a textbook example of what happens when two different Title VII protections collide.

On one side sits religious accommodation. Employees generally have the right to express sincerely held religious beliefs, and employers must accommodate those beliefs unless doing so creates an undue hardship.

On the other side sits protection against harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation. Employers have a legal obligation to provide a workplace free from unlawful harassment and to ensure LGBTQ+ employees are treated with dignity and respect.

What happens when one employee's expression of faith is perceived by another employee as hostility toward their identity?

That's where the easy answers disappear.

Too often, employers approach these conflicts as though one protected class should automatically prevail over another. The law doesn't work that way. Title VII protects both religious employees and LGBTQ+ employees. An employer that reflexively sides with one group without considering the rights of the other creates legal risk and workplace discord.

That does not mean employers should sit on the sidelines. They shouldn't. But neither should they become arbiters of competing belief systems. An employer's role is not to decide whether a religious viewpoint or a social viewpoint is more worthy of protection. Its role is to regulate workplace conduct. The focus should be on behavior and workplace impact, not ideology. In other words, employers should protect beliefs and referee conduct.

The better approach is to focus less on the viewpoint being expressed and more on its workplace impact.

Is the conduct directed at a particular employee? Is it creating a hostile work environment? Is it interfering with someone's ability to do their job? Is it merely an expression of personal belief, or has it crossed the line into harassment or discrimination?

Those questions matter because Title VII does not require employers to eliminate disagreement. It requires employers to prevent unlawful harassment.

That's an important distinction.

Employees are entitled to hold different religious, political, and social beliefs. They are not entitled to harass one another because of those beliefs. Likewise, employees are entitled to be free from discrimination because of their sexual orientation, but that protection does not automatically prohibit coworkers from expressing religious viewpoints with which they disagree.

The challenge for employers is finding the line between protected expression and unlawful conduct. That line is rarely bright, often controversial, and increasingly common in today's workplace.

The Giants attempted to navigate that tension in their response. The organization reaffirmed its support for Pride Night while also acknowledging that individual players may make personal choices regarding participation in team-sponsored events.

That approach will satisfy almost no one.

Some LGBTQ+ advocates argue the players should have faced discipline because their conduct undermined the purpose of the event. Others argue the players should have been free to express their faith without criticism.

Both sides miss an important point.

Inclusion isn't tested when everyone agrees. It's tested when people don't.

Any employer can create a workplace that welcomes people who share the same values. The real challenge is creating a workplace where employees with fundamentally different beliefs can coexist professionally and respectfully.

That doesn't mean every form of expression must be permitted. Employers can and should enforce neutral workplace rules. MLB's warning reportedly stemmed from a uniform-policy violation, not the content of the message itself. That's an important distinction. Content-neutral rules are often far easier to enforce than rules that appear to target a particular viewpoint.

The Giants controversy isn't really about baseball. It's about a challenge employers face every day. When religious expression and LGBTQ+ protections appear to collide, the answer isn't to choose a side. The answer is to apply the same standard to everyone, focus on conduct rather than ideology, and remember that Title VII protects both groups. The hardest workplace issues arise when two protected rights point in different directions. That's exactly when employers need to be most careful.

Regrets, I've had a few.

My life's biggest regret is that I never studied abroad.

The opportunity was there. I just didn't take it. At the time, it felt like too much of a risk. It felt expensive. It felt complicated. And it just felt easier to stay where I was comfortable.

I've regretted it ever since.

And even though I've spent decades making up for lost time, I've never stopped wondering how different my life might have been had I gotten on that plane when I was 20 instead of staying home. The travel bug has since bit me hard. I just wish I had started sooner.

So years ago, I made a promise to myself that if I ever had kids, I would encourage them not to make the same mistake.

Apparently, my sales pitch worked.

This fall, my daughter will spend the first semester of her junior year in college studying abroad in Marseille, France.

And on Monday, we put my 17-year-old son, a rising high school senior, on a plane to London for a three-week summer program studying sports management.

For him, this trip is more than a summer experience. It's his first step toward a goal he's been talking about for years. He wants to study sports management full-time at a university in England. He wants to build a career in football. And ultimately, he hopes to work for a Premier League club.

It's an ambitious dream. The odds are long. But every meaningful dream starts with a first step. For him, that first step was boarding a plane to London.

As parents, we spend years trying to help our kids navigate risk, uncertainty, disappointment, and failure. Yet some of the most important moments in life require us to do the opposite. We have to encourage them to leave the nest. To venture beyond To venture beyond their comfort zone and ours. To embrace uncertainty. To take chances. To trust that they'll be stronger because of it.

That's what studying abroad represents. It's not just education. It's growth.

And while I'm a little jealous that my kids are getting the opportunity I passed up, I'm far more grateful that they're willing to seize it.

Sometimes the best way to deal with your regrets isn't to dwell on them. It's to help your kids seize the opportunities you let pass by.

      

Sometimes the merits don't matter. And that's exactly the point.

Imagine you walk into court with what appears to be a strong case. The law is on your side. The facts are on your side. Even the judge seems troubled by what the government is doing. And then you lose anyway. Not because you're wrong. Because the court says it lacks the power to decide whether you're right.

That's essentially what happened last week in FreeState Justice v. EEOC.

The case arose from the EEOC's response to President Trump's January 2025 executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female. Following that order, then Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas announced that the agency was rolling back what it characterized as the prior administration's "gender identity agenda."

Words turned into actions.

According to the lawsuit, the EEOC stopped processing certain categories of gender-identity discrimination charges. The agency resumed investigating some claims involving hiring, firing, and promotion decisions. But it allegedly continued refusing to process claims alleging harassment based on gender identity and retaliation against employees who complained about such discrimination.

In practical terms, transgender employees could still file certain discrimination charges with the EEOC. But if a transgender employee alleged workplace harassment or retaliation, the agency allegedly would not investigate those claims.

The lawsuit also alleged that the EEOC directed state fair-employment agencies that it would no longer reimburse them for investigating gender-identity charges on the agency's behalf.

The plaintiff, an LGBTQ+ legal-services organization called FreeState Justice, argued that these policy changes effectively denied transgender workers access to protections that Title VII guarantees.

They have a point. 

In 2020, the Supreme Court held in Bostock v. Clayton County that discrimination because of transgender status is discrimination because of sex under Title VII. Since then, the EEOC has treated gender-identity discrimination claims as falling within the statute's protections.

The lawsuit essentially alleged that the EEOC had decided to stop enforcing part of Title VII for a particular group of employees.

That's why Chief Judge George Russell's opinion contains a remarkable phrase.

Describing the EEOC's actions, he called them "deeply troubling."

Judges don't casually insert language like that into opinions. It's hard to read those two words as anything other than an acknowledgment that the court saw serious issues with what the agency was doing.

But then the judge did something that infuriated the plaintiffs and anyone who agrees with them. He dismissed the case without ever deciding whether the EEOC's conduct was legal.

The problem wasn't the merits. The problem was standing.

The court relied heavily on the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in United States v. Texas. That case reaffirmed a basic principle about separation of powers: courts generally do not get to tell executive agencies whom to investigate, whom to prosecute, or how aggressively to enforce the law.

Those decisions belong to the Executive Branch.

The plaintiff wasn't asking the court to stop the government from doing something. It was asking the court to require the government to do something — namely, investigate and process more discrimination charges. Under Texas, that's usually a bridge too far.

And so the court never reached the underlying question that everyone actually cares about: whether the EEOC's policy violates Title VII. Instead, the case ended at the courthouse door.

It's easy to find that outcome frustrating. After all, if a court believes government conduct is "deeply troubling," shouldn't it decide whether that conduct is lawful?

Not necessarily.

One of the most important principles in our legal system is that courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They don't get to decide every dispute. They don't get to answer every important question. They don't get to issue advisory opinions simply because an issue matters. They can decide only the cases the Constitution and Congress authorize them to decide.

That's where standing comes in. Standing doctrine often feels like legal housekeeping. Lawyers love arguing it. Clients hate hearing about it. But standing serves an important function. It prevents courts from becoming roving commissions empowered to supervise every policy disagreement between citizens and the government.

Without those limits, judges could effectively become policymakers. That's a dangerous road regardless of whose policies are at issue.

The lesson from FreeState Justice is not that the EEOC was right.
The lesson is not that the EEOC was wrong.
The lesson is that sometimes a court never gets that far.

Sometimes a case is decided on the merits.
Sometimes it's decided on procedure.

And while it can be maddening to watch procedure trump substance — especially when the court itself describes the underlying conduct as "deeply troubling" — procedural rules are what keep our legal system functioning. They define the boundaries of judicial power. They preserve the separation of powers. They ensure that courts remain courts rather than political actors.

The alternative is a system in which judges decide whichever disputes they think deserve an answer. That might sound appealing when the judge agrees with you. It becomes a lot less appealing when the judge doesn't.

That's why procedure matters. Not because it's exciting. Because it's what stands between the rule of law and the rule of whoever happens to hold judicial power.

DOJ's attack on disparate impact gets Title VII exactly backwards

The Department of Justice just issued a legal opinion claiming that disparate impact liability is unconstitutional because it supposedly "incent[s] — and even coerce[s] — employers to make race-based decisions to avoid liability."

That's a remarkable claim.

It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how disparate impact law actually works.

Disparate impact claims exist precisely because they target facially neutral policies. No one is alleging intentional discrimination. No one is claiming that an employer adopted a policy because of race, sex, or some other protected characteristic.

The entire point of disparate impact is that a neutral rule can nonetheless operate as an unnecessary barrier to employment opportunities.

In fact, that's exactly why the Supreme Court recognized disparate impact liability in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. in 1971. The employer in Griggs required a high school diploma and certain aptitude test scores for transfers and promotions. The policies were facially neutral. They said nothing about race. Yet they disproportionately excluded Black employees and bore little relationship to successful job performance. The Supreme Court held that Title VII "proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." The Court's point was simple: employment criteria should measure a person's ability to perform a job, not create arbitrary barriers that disproportionately exclude protected groups.

Think aptitude tests. Physical fitness standards. Educational requirements. Criminal background checks. Credit checks. Hiring algorithms. AI screening tools.

None of these practices are discriminatory on their face. Yet all have the potential to disproportionately exclude certain protected groups.

Title VII's disparate impact framework asks a simple question: Does the employer have a legitimate business reason for using the practice?

If the answer is yes, the employer wins.

That's the part DOJ's opinion conveniently ignores.

Disparate impact liability does not require employers to adopt quotas. It does not require race-based hiring. It does not require preferential treatment.

It requires employers to justify employment practices that disproportionately exclude protected groups.

That's it.

An employer that uses a criminal background check because it is job-related and consistent with business necessity has a defense. An employer that uses a validated aptitude test tied to actual job performance has a defense. An employer that can demonstrate a legitimate need for a particular hiring criterion has a defense.

The law does not say, "You must hire more people from Group X."

The law says, "If your policy disproportionately screens out Group X, explain why the policy is necessary."

Those are very different things.

What's especially strange about DOJ's position is that it essentially assumes employers will engage in intentional discrimination to avoid being accused of unintentional discrimination.

That logic makes no sense.

If an employer responds to disparate impact concerns by making race-based employment decisions, that employer has created an entirely different legal problem. Title VII already prohibits intentional discrimination.

The cure for a potentially problematic employment practice is not race-conscious decision-making. The cure is validating the practice, modifying it, or eliminating it if it lacks a sufficient business justification.

The practical implications of this position could be enormous.

Consider criminal background checks.

For years, employers have been advised to carefully tailor criminal history screens to the requirements of specific jobs because broad exclusions can disproportionately affect certain racial groups. Employers have been encouraged to consider the nature of the offense, the time elapsed since conviction, and the relationship between the offense and the job.

Under DOJ's new theory, those concerns could largely disappear.

The same would be true for educational requirements that aren't actually necessary for job performance. Aptitude tests that have never been validated. Physical requirements that exceed what the job actually demands. AI hiring tools that systematically exclude qualified candidates.

Ironically, many of these are the very types of employment criteria that gave rise to disparate impact liability in Griggs more than five decades ago.

The question would no longer be whether these practices create unnecessary barriers to employment.

The question would be whether someone can prove intentional discrimination.

That's a much higher hurdle.

And that's exactly why disparate impact has been a cornerstone of civil rights enforcement for more than half a century.

Discrimination doesn't always announce itself with a racist memo or a smoking-gun email. Sometimes it appears through systems, policies, and practices that produce exclusionary outcomes despite facial neutrality.

That's why Congress codified Griggs' disparate-impact framework in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. That's why the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized it. And that's why the EEOC has spent decades enforcing it.

The DOJ's opinion may signal the administration's enforcement priorities. It may embolden employers to challenge disparate impact claims. It may even preview future litigation aimed at persuading courts to revisit longstanding precedent.

But that would require overturning more than fifty years of settled law dating back to Griggs v. Duke Power.

Let's not pretend that disparate impact liability somehow forces employers to engage in intentional discrimination. The doctrine exists because facially neutral employment practices can sometimes function as unnecessary barriers to equal employment opportunity. That's not a bug in Title VII. It's one of the statute's core features.

Eliminating disparate impact liability would not create a more merit-based workplace.

It would simply make it harder to challenge employment barriers that disproportionately exclude protected groups while serving little or no legitimate business purpose.

Unpaid leave is an ADA reasonable accommodation; it just can't be the only one you offer

If your ADA accommodation policy starts with "take unpaid leave," you're doing it wrong.

Just ask the 15 Dunkin' Donuts franchisees that recently agreed to pay $250,000 to settle an EEOC disability discrimination lawsuit.

According to the EEOC, these franchisees maintained a policy that refused to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with medical restrictions. Instead, workers were placed on unpaid, indefinite leave until they could return to work with no restrictions whatsoever. In other words, if an employee wasn't "100% healed," they weren't working.

The EEOC calls this a "100%-healed" policy. The ADA calls it unlawful.

Too many employers mistakenly assume that if an employee has medical restrictions, the safest course is to send them home until they're fully recovered. That instinct is understandable. It's also exactly what the ADA is designed to prevent.

The ADA requires employers to engage in an interactive process with employees seeking accommodations and to conduct an individualized assessment of whether they can perform the essential functions of their jobs with a reasonable accommodation. Sometimes that assessment and interactive process results in modified duties. Sometimes it's a schedule change. Sometimes it's assistive equipment. And yes, sometimes it's a leave of absence.

Leave can absolutely be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. It just can't be the only accommodation you're willing to consider.

An employee with lifting restrictions might still be able to perform the essential functions of a cashier position. An employee recovering from surgery might need a temporary schedule adjustment. An employee with a mobility impairment might need a workstation modification. Automatically placing these employees on unpaid leave skips the interactive process entirely and assumes that disability equals inability.

That's precisely what got these Dunkin' franchisees into trouble.

The EEOC also alleged that employees were effectively forced to resign or were terminated because they couldn't provide a doctor's note releasing them to work without restrictions. That's another hallmark of an unlawful 100%-healed policy. The ADA doesn't require employees to be restriction-free. It requires employers to determine whether employees can perform their jobs with reasonable accommodation.

The agency's settlement announcement contains a quote every employer should tape to its ADA policy manual: "The ADA requires employers to individually assess reasonable accommodations and grant those which do not pose an undue hardship for the employer. Uniform policies eliminating such individual considerations are red flags for ADA violations."

That's the lesson every employer should take from this settlement.

If your handbook, leave policy, or accommodation practices contain language requiring employees to be fully recovered, have no restrictions, or be 100% healed before returning to work, fix it now. Likewise, if your managers routinely respond to medical restrictions by immediately placing employees on unpaid leave without exploring other options, you're creating the same risk that cost these franchisees a quarter-million dollars.

The ADA requires individualized assessments, not automatic decisions. If your default response to workplace restrictions is unpaid leave, you're not engaging in the interactive process. You're building the plaintiff's case for them.

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