WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court rejected an appeal today from an Indiana law officer fired for refusing to work at a casino.
The state trooper had said that the gambling enforcement assignment would force him to violate his religious beliefs.
Benjamin Endres sued the state and lost. He wanted the Supreme Court to use his case to require law enforcement agencies to accommodate the religious views of employees. Justices refused to take on another religious case.
Endres, who is Baptist, said he was not opposed to general casino crime-fighting, but could not go along when the state designated him a full-time gaming officer and ordered him to report to a casino in Michigan City, Ind.
A federal law protects people from discrimination based on religion. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said the law does not require police and fire departments to assign workers to duties compatible with their principles.
That would be tough, the appeals judges said, because of the varying religious objections. “Must prostitutes be left exposed to slavery or murder at the hands of pimps because protecting them from crime would encourage them to ply their trade and thus offend almost every religious faith?” the appeals court asked.
One of the attorneys representing Endres, Jeremy Taylor, told justices that “public servants will find their religious freedom in greater peril than those they protect.”
Casey Mattox, another attorney who represented Endres, said he believed the Supreme Court should have considered the argument that the appeals court overstepped its bounds in giving police and fire departments exemptions from religious discrimination laws.
Mattox, an attorney for the Rutherford Institute, a Virginia-based civil liberties group involved in church-state litigation, said he believed the Indiana State Police should have been able to find another assignment for Endres.
“The state here has never even had to give Mr. Endres a reason why they could not accommodate him,” Mattox said. “That is the really disturbing part.”
Officials for both the Indiana State Police and the state attorney general’s office declined to comment on the Supreme Court’s decision.
A county judge ruled in 2002 on a separate lawsuit filed by Endres that the state police board had the legal authority to fire the trooper. That ruling did not address the religious-rights argument.
An appeal of that decision is scheduled for a May 13 hearing before the Indiana Supreme Court, said Staci Schneider, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office.
The case turned away by the Supreme Court was Endres v. Indiana State Police.