In Brown v. Alaska Airlines, the Ninth Circuit revived Title VII religious discrimination claims brought by two flight attendants fired after objecting to the company’s public support for the Equality Act, proposed federal legislation extending nondiscrimination protections to sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Alaska posted its endorsement of the Act on an internal employee forum and invited comments. Marli Brown posted an explicitly religious objection, while Lacey Smith asked whether the company could “regulate morality.” Alaska deleted both posts that night, shut down further comments, investigated both employees, and eventually fired them for violating its anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.
The Ninth Circuit held that a jury, not a judge, should decide whether religion actually drove the terminations, pointing to internal emails questioning whether employees have a right to view LGBTQ rights as “immoral” and the airline’s own shifting characterizations of what the posts said. The court also distinguished this case from a failure-to-accommodate claim, treating it instead as straightforward discrimination. Judge Morgan Christen agreed as to Brown but dissented as to Smith, finding insufficient evidence connecting her termination to religion specifically.
The ruling clarifies that employers cannot rely on facially neutral policies to shield employment decisions from scrutiny when the record suggests those policies were selectively applied.
Read Opinion Here: Brown v. Alaska Airlines