Attorneys for Ron Hittle, former fire chief of Stockton, California, petitioned the Supreme Court on Tuesday to review a lower court ruling that affirmed Hittle’s firing after he attended a highly regarded leadership conference hosted at a church.
“It is a tragic day for religious liberty in America when someone can be fired because they attend an event that includes religious perspectives,” said Stephanie Taub, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, which filed the petition along with the Baker Botts law firm and the Church State Council.
Hittle, according to the petition, had served in the Stockton fire department for 24 years and became fire chief in 2005. In 2010, an anonymous letter to the city claimed that Hittle, a Christian, was a “religious fanatic who should not be allowed to continue as the Fire Chief of Stockton.” About a month later, Hittle’s supervisor and deputy city manager Laurie Montes accused Hittle of being part of a “Christian Coalition,” and told him that as fire chief, he should not engage in any of “those type of activities.” She interrogated him about his off-duty religious activities and directed him a few months later to obtain leadership training.
In his search for leadership training, Hittle found that a pastor friend had tickets to a Local Summit of the Global Leadership Summit, which, while faith-based, has through the years featured former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and many other high-profile professionals from religious and non-religious backgrounds. Hittle and three other fire department officials attended the Local Summit using their own money, and carpooling in the city vehicle Hittle had been instructed by the city to use at all times so that he could respond to emergencies if needed.
Not long after, the city received another anonymous letter attacking Hittle and the three other employees for attending “a religious function on city time” using “a city vehicle.” Hittle was interrogated by Montes and another city manager Bob Deis, who decried the religious nature of the training and what Deis perceived as a religious “clique” in the fire department.
In November 2010, the city began an investigation of Hittle. Trudy Largent, the investigator, did not contact Global Leadership Summit or investigate whether the training Hittle received satisfied Montes’ demands. In her report, she characterized Hittle’s attendance at a “religious” event on city time and in a city vehicle as the “most serious act” of “misconduct” and said that when Hittle realized that the Summit was being held at a church, “this should have alerted Hittle that his participation and that of his managers would not be appropriate.” Largent’s suggestion after her investigation was that Hittle be terminated, her recommendation allegedly based primarily on his attendance at a “religious” event.
Hittle was terminated on Oct. 3, 2011. He proceeded to sue the City of Stockton, and the district court ruled in favor of the city. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the ruling, claiming that Hittle did not meet criteria used to determine cases of religious discrimination under Title VII. However, Judges VanDyke and Callahan dissented, stating that the record contains ample evidence of Hittles’ higher-ups’ discriminatory intent.
First Liberty Institute, Baker Botts and the Church State Council argue that the framework used to evaluate whether Hittle’s treatment and termination by the city of Stockton constituted discrimination under Title VII—a framework called the McDonnell Douglas framework—“is preventing meritorious employment-discrimination cases from reaching a jury. … There is no reason that plaintiffs in Title VII cases should face the added burden of disproving the employer’s proffered reason for the adverse employment decision. Yet that errant and nontextual view holds sway in nearly half the country and is causing demonstrable injustices for worthy plaintiffs.”
Alan Reinach of the Church State Council said: “Chief Ron Hittle was an exemplary leader of the Stockton Fire Department who was fired because of his Christian faith. But to make matters worse, the courts reversed the evidentiary assumptions and chose to believe Stockton’s denial that it did not discriminate, instead of focusing on the abundant evidence Chief Hittle supplied.”
Taub added, “The city showed extreme anti-religious bias and broke the law when it fired Chief Hittle. We are asking the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court’s decision and uphold the clear meaning of Title VII to protect all Americans in the workplace.”
Photo: First Liberty Institute