By Charles Steinberg, GleanerNow, with Adventist Review staff
My cell phone rang.
It was Jeffrey Britt, a member of the Bremerton Seventh-day Adventist Church in the U.S. state of Washington.
Britt is a 30-year Navy veteran who decided to return to work at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, as a civil service employee. His employer had harassed him about requesting time off work to observe Sabbath, and the shipyard had a legal document that it wanted him to sign. The document would require his boss to take sensitivity classes and nothing more.
I told him not to sign it and that the Northwest Religious Liberty Association would help him out. The Northwest Religious Liberty Association, where I work as vice president, is a Seventh-day Adventist-affiliated organization that promotes religious freedom in the U.S. Northwest and assists local church members like Britt with Sabbath conflicts. U.S. law stipulates that employers must give reasonable accommodation to employees’ religious beliefs.
