Posts

Judge on Military Vaccine Mandate: ‘Hard to Imagine a More Consistent Display of Discrimination’

/0 Comments/in , /by

On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas expanded that lawsuit – as well as the preliminary injunction the court issued in January – to now prevent punishment of any Navy personnel who (1) have religious objections to the DoD’s vaccine mandate and (2) have requested a religious accommodation from the mandate.

In his decision, Judge Reed O’Connor stated:

“Here, the potential class members have suffered the ‘same injury,’ arising from violations of their constitutional rights. Each has submitted a religious accommodation request, and each has had his request denied, delayed, or dismissed on appeal. Exactly zero requests have been granted. And while Defendants encourage this Court to disregard the data, it is hard to imagine a more consistent display of discrimination. As previously explained in this Court’s preliminary injunction order, Plaintiffs have suffered the serious injury of infringement of their religious liberty rights under RFRA and the First Amendment.”

The original injunction was issued in favor of dozens of elite Navy SEALs. Mike Berry of First Liberty Institute explains that from the get-go, his legal group hoped to support more than the roughly three dozen elite Navy personnel in the original lawsuit – and specifically asked O’Connor to allow that. (Read more from “Judge on Military Vaccine Mandate: ‘Hard to Imagine a More Consistent Display of Discrimination’” HERE)

Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.

Children’s Hospital Fires Unvaxxed Nurses After Questioning And Rejecting Their Religious Beliefs

/0 Comments/in , /by

“Ijust love it. I love my job. I love what I do, and this has been really hard. Sorry.”

The pediatric nurse, who had been working at Children’s Wisconsin for 12 years, choked back tears as she stressed her passion for treating sick children to the chaplain and human resources representative tasked with questioning whether her religious beliefs were sincere enough to earn her an exemption from the Milwaukee hospital’s vaccine mandate, which took effect in November.

This nurse, whose religious exemption appeal interview was shared with The Federalist on the condition of anonymity, was finally granted an exemption after first being denied, then appealing, then being grilled by the two hospital representatives about her religious convictions. Some of her colleagues weren’t so fortunate.

Of the five appeal interview recordings reviewed by The Federalist, only two of the employees were granted religious exemptions despite the same general questions being asked to each of the Children’s workers and similar themes in each of their answers. The other three were denied.

Staff was notified in July about the vaccine mandate, which required them to get the Covid-19 shot by mid-November. Employees had until Sept. 1 to request a religious exemption, according to a vaccine overview document that Children’s WI President and CEO Peggy Troy emailed to all hospital employees, and they were notified of the decisions later. (Read more from “Children’s Hospital Fires Unvaxxed Nurses After Questioning and Rejecting Their Religious Beliefs” HERE)

Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.

19 Federal Agencies Plan to Keep Tracking Lists of Religious Objectors to COVID Vaccines

/0 Comments/in , /by

This week, we revealed that an obscure federal agency plans to keep lists of the “personal religious information” employees who had religious objections to the federal employee vaccine mandate.

As it turns out, the little-known Pre-trial Services Agency for the District of Columbia isn’t the only federal agency involved. As we feared, a whole-of-government effort looks to be underway.

A little digging at the Federal Register revealed that there are at least 19 total federal agencies—including five cabinet level agencies—that have created or proposed to create these tracking lists for religious-exemption requests from their employees.

The list includes the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of the Treasury, to name only a few.

As the nation’s largest employer, with over four million civilian and military employees, the federal government has received tens of thousands of religious exemption requests. It now appears that an increasing number of federal agencies are keeping and preserving those individuals’ names, religious information, personally identifying information, and other data stored in lists across multiple government agencies.

Why?

The earliest set of proposals appears to have been rolled out in October of last year, during the start of the holiday season in a possible effort to ensure very little attention was paid to a coordinated data collection move. Many of the announcements have clocked only a few page views. Almost none attracted any public comments. Most permitted only a 30-day window for submitting objections. All announcements were issued within a few weeks of one another.

The timing alone raises questions.

The Pre-trial Services Agency in D.C. was only the most recent iteration of a disturbing trend—the Biden administration is creating lists that can all communicate with one another on which individuals have sought religious exemptions from the federal employee vaccine mandate or other religious accommodations within the scope of their employment by the government.

Several of the notices, but not all, indicate that they are being issued to implement Biden’s COVID-19 executive order on federal government employees. The rest have proffered the Privacy Act of 1974—which establishes a code of information practices that governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of information about individuals stored by federal agencies—as their justification for the creation of a new list.

The agencies plan to collect religious affiliation, the reasons and support given for religious accommodation requests, names, contact information, date of birth, aliases, home address, contact information, and other identifying information. These lists will be shared between federal agencies.

The notices do not explain how long they plan on storing this data, why they need to share it between agencies, or why they need to keep it beyond the decision to grant or deny an employee’s religious accommodation request.

The Federal Register announcements raised eyebrows for Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. In his public comment to the Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stating strenuous opposition to the list creation, he noted:

On November 18, at the direction of the Biden administration, four federal agencies simultaneously announced that those who exercise their legal right to seek a health or religious waiver from a vaccine mandate would be tracked in federal databases. Rather than give the public ample time to weigh in on the advisability or legality of collecting such personal information, the Department of Transportation’s database in particular became effective on the day it was published…

The chilling effect on a citizens’ exercise of religion due to the creation of this Database is alarming… the federal government decrees that a citizen who seeks a medical exemption or a waiver based on a sincerely held religious belief has automatically consented to being entered in the Database. To put it plainly, invoking the legal right to exercise one’s religious faith risks simultaneously waiving that legal right.

The day we broke the story on the Pre-trial Services Agency announcement in the federal register, the notice had 16 views. As of the publication of this story, it now has more than 13,000.

Schmitt is demanding answers from the Biden administration. We’re hoping more people do, too.

And based on those numbers, they just might. (For more from the author of “19 Federal Agencies Plan to Keep Tracking Lists of Religious Objectors to COVID Vaccines” please click HERE)

Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.

Religious Exemptions for Military Vaccine Mandate Hard to Come By

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Marine Corps granted two religious exemption requests for the coronavirus vaccine, the service announced Thursday, marking the first time any such accommodation was affirmed despite thousands of requests.

Religious exemptions are hard to come by in the military. This is the first the Marines have granted in at least a decade, according to the Military Times. The lack of such accommodations as it relates to the coronavirus has also become a source of political division, a microcosm of the perpetual debate regarding whether mandating the vaccine comports with people’s First Amendment rights.

Even though each service branch has reached the mid-90th percentile in vaccination rate among active-duty troops, the select few who have refused, a count that is approximately in the tens of thousands, are finding allies on the political right.

Dozens of Republican lawmakers and the America First Policy Institute, a policy group backed by former President Donald Trump, filed an amicus brief in support of a group of roughly three dozen Navy SEALs who successfully sued the Department of Defense alleging that their religious exemption requests were not legitimately considered before getting rejected.

During Thursday’s press briefing, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby again declined to outline DOD’s next steps related to the judge’s decision. (Read more from “Religious Exemptions for Military Vaccine Mandate Hard to Come By” HERE)

Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.