The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Blue Bell Creameries after it fired a Jewish body-shop technician who refused to shave his beard for religious reasons.
According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, the Texas-based ice cream company terminated Gary Blackshear in March 2025, less than a month after he told his supervisor he would not shave his beard because of his religious beliefs.
Blackshear worked at Blue Bell’s Sylacauga, Alabama, production facility refurbishing fiberglass parts on the company fleet.
The company said that work requires a respirator that “completely seals”—and Blackshear was asked to shave his beard.
However, the lawsuit says some of his coworkers had similar beards and weren’t told to shave—even though they were doing similar work.
According to the complaint, Blackshear’s fleet manager and the company’s safety coordinator both questioned whether he was really Jewish.
When Blackshear said he wouldn’t shave his beard because of his religion, the safety coordinator allegedly told him he would have to do so anyway and that it didn’t matter that he is Jewish, because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was “above that.”
In fact, the lawsuit says Blue Bell’s own lawyers advised the company that Blackshear must be accommodated with a mask to fit over his beard. Blue Bell says it ordered one—only it arrived ten days after he was fired.
Blue Bell said it fired Blackshear for “theft of company time” after two brief absences on a single day—18 minutes to get food for his coworkers and seven minutes to bring food to his son—during which, the company said, he left the premises without permission or clocking out.
And, here again, the lawsuit says other employees who engaged in similar conduct were given warnings, but not fired.
The EEOC complaint calls all this a pretext for retaliating and discriminating against Blackshear, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It asks the court for an injunction and an order requiring Blue Bell to correct its policies and for monetary damages.
The lawsuit comes after the parties failed to reach a settlement through EEOC’s conciliation procedures. It’s the latest in a series of cases following Trump’s executive orders to combat anti-Christian bias and antisemitism in the workplace, including actions against Apple, Dollar General, and Columbia University.
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