Fwd: Religious discrimination vs. political discrimination

[Samuel Ventola Samuelv at ix.netcom.com]

"Volokh, Eugene" <VOLOKH at mail.law.ucla.edu> writes:

>        An acquaintance of mine, Ed Blum, claims that he was fired by
>his employer (a brokerage, I believe), for spearheading the Houston
>anti-race-preferences initiative.  Some mutual friends called me up
>about this and asked whether the employer could do that.  Yes, I said,
>unless Texas is one of the states that bans discrimination based on
>outside political activities; many states do not impose such bans, and
>even those that do are fairly limited....

Some states, including Colorado but I'm not sure about Texas, prohibit
terminating employees for "legal activities away from work."  Such statutes
were passed at the behest of the tobacco industry to protect the jobs of
smokers, but have since been used to protect those who have engaged in a
wide variety of off-work activity.  Cases here in Colorado have involved a
homosexual, a paralegal who appeared in a pornographic magazine, and a
supermarket bakery clerk who turned out to be an outspoken member of the
KKK.  The only one I've seen litigated to judgment and through appeal was
the one involving the homosexual, who was successful.  I suppose such
statutes would also protect religious activity if there were some problem
(such as failure to file a timely administrative charge) with the religious
discrimination claim.