5th Cir., joining the 7th Cir., holds that an auto-repair business that only franchises to Christians—including ethnic Jews who are professing Christians—does not commit racial discrimination in violation of § 1981, which does not reach religious discrimination.
www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...
![Domanic makes no serious effort on appeal to show any error in the district court’s ruling. That is unsurprising. As discussed, the evidence proved without contradiction that Christian Brothers has a longstanding and consistent policy of franchising only to professing Christians. And no evidence suggested that this policy was a pretext for racial discrimination against persons of Jewish ancestry (or any other ancestry). To the contrary, the undisputed evidence showed that Christian Brothers has franchised to two ethnic Jews who are professing Christians. Domanic does make the novel argument that, as far as § 1981 is concerned, there can be no distinction between discrimination based on Jewish ancestry and discrimination based on Jewish faith. Section 1981, he contends, “protect[s] Jews . . . regardless of whether they are religious or ethnic Jews.” The district court correctly rejected this argument.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:24vva42nxim6zbcmnozegoef/bafkreid6lfptbj6ax3kdpjpbu2mnwsoedrp6mj54gjy5uymruecn5gvhjm)
![In the same month, another HSD manager asked Diemert, “[W]hat could you possibly offer our department . . . , being a straight white male?” In 2016, Diemert discovered that one of his coworkers had denied utility assistance to an eligible white applicant because, in the coworker’s words, the applicant had “white privilege.” When Diemert told his coworker that she was not permitted to discriminate against applicants based on race, his manager, Hatcher-Mays, berated him and told him that “it was ‘impossible’ to be racist toward ‘white people.’”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:24vva42nxim6zbcmnozegoef/bafkreie7yrwmvugtlhi2yr5c4zusb65zcgqoyfwr3srvqhpderivpmv2eq)
