On Monday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of two employees at North Carolina company Aurora Pro Services who say they were fired after refusing to participate in the company’s daily Christian prayer meetings. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Greensboro, North Carolina.
According to the complaint, while there is no mention of it on the company’s website, Aurora Pro Services mandates daily attendance at prayer meetings, regardless of employees’ religious beliefs. The case seems to stem from the 2020 firing of one of the workers, a clip of which purported to show the events, where a man (possibly owner Oscar Davids) says, “You don’t have to believe in God. You don’t have to like it. You have to participate. If you don’t, that okay, you don’t have to work here.” Later in that video the man explains that “This is our first core purpose.”
The EEOC released a statement about the lawsuit saying that these prayer meetings were “conducted by the company owner and included Bible readings, Christian devotionals, and solicitation of prayer requests from employees.” According to the complaint, the construction manager asked to excused from the “prayer portion” of the meeting and was docked pay as a result, then subsequently fired. The other employee, a customer service representative, stopped attending the meetings a few months after this initial incident, and was summarily fired as well.
The DailyDot reported on the 2020 firing, pointing to a Yelp profile of the company where the Aurora Pro Services owner wrote, “Every morning our company starts their day with the reading of the Holy Gospel, a prayer, we listen to our CORE Values and in unity pray for someone who needs healing.”
Aurora Pro Services in Greensboro, NC fires an employee for not praying with them pic.twitter.com/N5sPTDsZk9
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) November 25, 2020
The EEOC is asking that this case receive a full trial and in the wake of the radial theocratic Supreme Court decision to allow a high school football coach to lead prayers in a public school, it might not be long before we get to see SCOTUS defraud logic once again. Watching Justices Alito and Thomas and Barrett and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Roberts twisting themselves into a righteous pretzel of logic-free dogma in the service of a post-Civil War fundamentalism finessed for cameras in the 1950s by people like Billy Graham and radicalized by the 1980s by con men like Oral Roberts, Billy Graham’s progeny, and Pat Robertson will be quite a lesson in how abjectly unimpressive the minds of many Judges really are.
The Associated Press reports that the construction manager, John McGaha, says he identifies as an atheist and began attending the mandatory meetings, which were initially about 15 minutes long. According to McGaha, those meetings quickly became 45 minutes and longer, and also became more intolerable. McGaha says he was even asked to lead a Christian prayer at one point—which he refused to do.
Melinda C. Dugas, an attorney for the EEOC, gave the bare bones of the case against the employer: “Federal law protects employees from having to choose between their sincerely held religious beliefs and their jobs. Employers who sponsor prayer meetings in the workplace have a legal obligation to accommodate employees whose personal religious or spiritual views conflict with the company’s practice.”