Facts
- Evelyn Smith owned and leased four residential rental units in Chico, California, operated as a for-profit rental business.
- Smith held a sincere religious belief that sexual relations between unmarried persons are sinful and believed she should not facilitate such conduct by renting to unmarried couples.
- Kenneth Phillips and Gail Randall, an unmarried couple, applied to rent one of Smith’s units and paid a deposit.
- Before move-in, Phillips informed Smith they were not married; Smith then refused to rent to them and returned their deposit.
- The Fair Employment and Housing Commission (FEHC) found Smith refused to rent because the applicants were unmarried, constituting marital-status discrimination under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), and ordered corrective relief.
- The Court of Appeal reversed on free-exercise grounds; the California Supreme Court granted review.
Issues
- Whether refusing to rent to an unmarried couple based on religious objection to extramarital cohabitation is discrimination “because of … marital status” under FEHA.
- Whether applying FEHA’s marital-status antidiscrimination rule to a landlord with sincere religious objections violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
- Whether applying FEHA in these circumstances violates the California Constitution’s protections for religious exercise/liberty of conscience.
Decision
- The California Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeal and reinstated the FEHC’s decision and remedial order.
- The court held Smith’s refusal to rent to the couple was discrimination “because of … marital status” within FEHA.
- The court held FEHA, as applied, did not violate federal free-exercise rights because it is a neutral, generally applicable law that incidentally burdens religiously motivated conduct.
- The court held the California Constitution did not require a religious exemption from FEHA’s generally applicable housing antidiscrimination requirements.
Legal Principles
- A landlord’s refusal to rent to a couple because they are not married constitutes discrimination “because of … marital status” under FEHA, even if the landlord characterizes the refusal as opposition to anticipated sexual conduct.
- FEHA’s housing antidiscrimination provisions operate to protect persons from being denied housing based on protected characteristics, not to regulate conduct in the abstract.
- Under federal free-exercise doctrine, a valid, neutral law of general applicability may be applied to religiously motivated conduct without a constitutionally required exemption when the law does not target religion and only incidentally burdens religious exercise.
- The California Constitution’s religion provisions do not require accommodation of religiously motivated conduct that conflicts with neutral, generally applicable antidiscrimination laws governing the commercial housing market.
- The state has a compelling interest in preventing housing discrimination, and recognizing a constitutional right to discriminate would materially impair the effectiveness of antidiscrimination enforcement.
Conclusion
The court concluded that refusing to rent to an unmarried couple is prohibited marital-status discrimination under FEHA and that neither the federal nor California free-exercise protections require an exemption for religiously motivated rental decisions in a generally applicable antidiscrimination scheme.