hezekiah jones

In denying an employer's request for summary judgment in a case in which the employer had demoted an employee pursuant to the employee's membership in Matthew Hale's <a href="http://www.wcotc.com" target="_blank">World Church of the Creator</a>, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin deemed "Creativity" a religion protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"[T]he district court found the fact that certain white supremacist organizations, mainly the Ku Klux Klan, had been found not to be religions did not logically mean that Creativity also was not a religion," according to the headnotes at lexisnexis.com

Reverend Christopher Lee Peterson was apparently relieved of his supervisory responsibilities and given a pay cut at Wilmur Communications in Milwaukee when his own supervisors learned from a newspaper report that Peterson was one of Matt Hale's racist minions.

The court found that a jury could reasonably find that the actions against Peterson were motivated by his employer's objection to Peterson's "religious beliefs."

For any aficionados of morbid entertainment in the area, Peterson, along with other assorted Nazis and KKK (unlike "Creativity," not a religion) kahunas, will be "speaking" on the steps of the federal courthouse in Milwaukee on Saturday, November 23, 2002, at 1 p.m.

Toto

The decision is <a href="http://www.wcotc.com/legal/court-decision.doc" target="_blank">here</a> on the Church's website (or Google 'world church of the creator" "title vii of the civil rights act" and read the html version in the Google cache)

The company lost the motion for summary judgment, but it looks like they could prevail on the facts if they get their case together.

The company demoted Patterson because he was a supervisor over a number of non-white people. Once it learned that Patterson claimed all non-whites were inferior, it felt it had to releive him of his supervisory duties to avoid violating the rights of the non-white employees. There were some insufficiently documented complaints that Patterson was not evenhanded in his supervision, but they were not on the record for the motion for summary judgment.