Washington Supreme Court: Ministerial Exception Barred Negligent Hiring, Supervision Claims

The Washington Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution barred a Presbyterian church elder’s negligent retention and supervision claims against her church, but that her Title VII claims needed more analysis.

The elder in question had raised objections to the manner in which her church’s pastor was conducting church tours and was ultimately fired. She brought suit for, among other things, negligent retention and supervision, and sex discrimination under Title VII. (She had brought other claims too, but they were not at issue in the Supreme Court’s opinion.)

The Supreme Court passed on the question of whether the ministerial exception barred the Title VII claim, because the factual record concerning whether this particular woman qualified as a “minister” was “not developed sufficiently to make the determination.”

However, since there was no apparently no dispute that actual pastor in question (as well as his superiors) were bona fide ministers, the Supreme Court held that allowing negligent retention or supervision claims to proceed against the church, based on allegations that the pastor was negligently retained or supervised, would constitute impermissible entanglement with the church’s right to pick the minister of its choosing.

The case is Erdman v. Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church.

Washington Supreme Court: 2006 Amendments to the LAD Not Retroactive

The Washington (State) Supreme Court has held that the 2006 amendments to the Washington Law Against Discrimination (which added “sexual orientation” as a protected class) were not retroactive. As a result, a University of Washington employee could not sue for sexual orientation-based harassment based on alleged anti-homosexual comments made by her supervisor prior to the effective date of the amendment.

However…

The Court also noted that that this same pre-amendment conduct could still be relevant to “prove intent behind postamendment conduct.” And in this case, there was one allegedly hostile act that took place after the effective date of the amendment to the WLAD. According to the plaintiff, this same supervisor had stated, in reference to the prospect of dealing with the plaintiff’s homosexuality, that he was “going to come back a very angry man” when returning from a tour in Iraq.

That was enough for the Supreme Court, which held that the plaintiff’s hostile environment claim should survive, since the “angry man” comment was sufficiently severe when illumined against the background of the earlier pre-amendment anti-gay statements.

The case is Loeffelholz v. University of Washington.