Pride Night, Bible Verses, and When Title VII Protections Collide

Three San Francisco Giants pitchers are facing backlash after writing a Bible passage on their Pride Night caps during a team-sponsored LGBTQ+ celebration. The players cited Genesis 9:12-16, the biblical passage describing the rainbow as God's covenant with humanity. Critics viewed the gesture as a deliberate rebuke of Pride Month and the LGBTQ+ community. The Giants apologized for the pain caused. Major League Baseball warned the players for violating uniform rules.

Predictably, the story has become another front in America's never-ending culture war.

But strip away the politics and outrage for a moment, and what's left is a workplace issue every employer should understand.

While the setting is a Major League Baseball clubhouse, the legal and practical issues are no different from those employers confront every day.

The Giants wanted to send a message of inclusion. The players wanted to express their religious beliefs. Those objectives collided in public.

Welcome to the modern workplace.

Regrets, I've had a few.

My life's biggest regret is that I never studied abroad.

The opportunity was there. I just didn't take it. At the time, it felt like too much of a risk. It felt expensive. It felt complicated. And it just felt easier to stay where I was comfortable.

I've regretted it ever since.

And even though I've spent decades making up for lost time, I've never stopped wondering how different my life might have been had I gotten on that plane when I was 20 instead of staying home. The travel bug has since bit me hard. I just wish I had started sooner.

So years ago, I made a promise to myself that if I ever had kids, I would encourage them not to make the same mistake.

Sometimes the merits don't matter. And that's exactly the point.

Imagine you walk into court with what appears to be a strong case. The law is on your side. The facts are on your side. Even the judge seems troubled by what the government is doing. And then you lose anyway. Not because you're wrong. Because the court says it lacks the power to decide whether you're right.

That's essentially what happened last week in FreeState Justice v. EEOC.

DOJ's attack on disparate impact gets Title VII exactly backwards

The Department of Justice just issued a legal opinion claiming that disparate impact liability is unconstitutional because it supposedly "incent[s] — and even coerce[s] — employers to make race-based decisions to avoid liability."

That's a remarkable claim.

It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how disparate impact law actually works.

Disparate impact claims exist precisely because they target facially neutral policies. No one is alleging intentional discrimination. No one is claiming that an employer adopted a policy because of race, sex, or some other protected characteristic.

The entire point of disparate impact is that a neutral rule can nonetheless operate as an unnecessary barrier to employment opportunities.

Unpaid leave is an ADA reasonable accommodation; it just can't be the only one you offer

If your ADA accommodation policy starts with "take unpaid leave," you're doing it wrong.

Just ask the 15 Dunkin' Donuts franchisees that recently agreed to pay $250,000 to settle an EEOC disability discrimination lawsuit.

According to the EEOC, these franchisees maintained a policy that refused to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with medical restrictions. Instead, workers were placed on unpaid, indefinite leave until they could return to work with no restrictions whatsoever. In other words, if an employee wasn't "100% healed," they weren't working.

The EEOC calls this a "100%-healed" policy. The ADA calls it unlawful.

The EEOC's new Enforcement Plan is way more politics than strategy

The EEOC has replaced its 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan with a new National Enforcement Plan for 2025-2029. The change is more than cosmetic. It reflects a significant shift in what the agency believes its mission should be.

To be clear, intentional discrimination against anyone because of race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic is unlawful. Full stop. Title VII protects everyone. An employer cannot justify discrimination simply because it occurs in the name of diversity, equity, or inclusion.

But that's not really the story here.

The story is what the EEOC has chosen to prioritize.

WIRTW #800: the 'world cup' edition

The World Cup kicks off on June 11, and plenty of matches will be played during the workday. (June 17, I'm looking at you. Portugal vs. DR Congo starts at 1 p.m. ET, followed by England vs. Croatia just three hours later.)

So what's an employer of football-loving employees to do?

Nick Mohammed, of Ted Lasso fame, has a suggestion. He's released a tongue-in-cheek video called Fight for Your Right to Watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup at Work.

I'm not suggesting employees spend the next six weeks with one eye on their work and the other on a World Cup stream.

Then again, I'm not exactly suggesting they don't, at least for games that matter to them.

Instead of treating the World Cup as six weeks of lost productivity, smart employers might view it as six weeks of culture-building. A lunchtime watch party. A company bracket. National team jerseys on match days.

If employees are going to be paying attention anyway, you might as well harness the enthusiasm rather than police it. Productivity might dip for 90 minutes, but morale and goodwill can last a lot longer.

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Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.