Salesforce.com, Inc., threatened to leave Indiana in protest against that state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), claiming it legitimized discrimination. In an ironic twist of fate, Salesforce.com is now being sued… for discrimination.
RFRAs affirm the right of people of faith to live their lives—and if business owners, to run their business—according to their sincerely held religious beliefs. LGBT activists have demonized RFRAs, claiming they give a license to discriminate.
In reality, there appears not to be any reported instances of RFRAs being used to discriminate. Instead, a RFRA successfully protected Hobby Lobby and other Christian-owned businesses from having to provide abortion-related products and services to their employees, and would also, for example, protect a Christian baker who declined to bake a customized wedding cake that conveys a message celebrating same-sex marriage.
Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, Salesforce.com claimed that Indiana’s RFRA would result in discrimination and threatened to pull out of the Hoosier State. The San Francisco-based Salesforce.com has 1,400 employees in California.
Now, Salesforce.com is being sued by two employees, for both sex discrimination and race discrimination.
Maria Boyd and Tanya Blackwell are both minority women employed by Salesforce.com. Boyd is Puerto Rican, and Blackwell is black. They first filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and now have filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
The women are suing for damages for “wages, benefits, compensation, and other monetary loss suffered.”
Ken Klukowski is legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.