World Affairs Brief, September 17, 2021 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

WEEK TWO OF THE VACCINE MANDATE

The Battle for Religious Exemptions

I get emails every day from members of the military, contractors who work for the military, medical workers and corporate employers desperate for information on how to get a religious exemption. It’s going to be tough as every organization in the establishment is taking their cue from the Biden administration and making it hard on people claiming a religious exemption.

Well, even if an individual is connected to a religious denomination that doesn’t outright oppose or prohibit vaccination, that person’s individual beliefs can still be considered valid, experts say.

“It can be a personal, sincerely held religious belief which arises from the very nature of freedom and religion articulated in the First Amendment,” Domenique Camacho Moran, a New York-based labor attorney told CBS News.

In the past, employers have more often than not given employees who request religious exemption the benefit of the doubt. The high stakes of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, may lead some businesses to give such requests a further look.

“The employer generally has to go with the idea that the employee’s request is based on their sincerely held religious belief,” Keith Wilkes, an employment attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explained. “But if the employer has an objective basis for questioning its sincerity, the employer is justified to seek additional information.”

“It is always possible that a local church or temple does in fact espouse a view that vaccination is contrary to religious beliefs, so there is room for the employer to dig deeper on those sorts of requests,” Wilkes added.

Employment lawyers say having written documentation of a person’s religious beliefs is recommended when making the exemption request, but it’s not guaranteed to be a straightforward process, especially now. A note from a religious leader, for example, might be required now especially as the number of new cases around the country rise.

Here is an article from Life Site News that gives good coverage to the subject and the options.

The strongest exemptions are going to come from a large organized religion that has taken a direct stand against vaccines or against mandates—which are very few. Even Catholics will have a hard time as many Catholic universities are requiring the jab. As Life Site News says,

As numerous Catholic bishops have explained, the moral teaching of the Catholic Church holds that “a person may be required to refuse a medical intervention, including a vaccination, if his or her conscience comes to this judgment.”

Recent documents and statements from the Vatican, the Pontifical Academy for Life, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and modern catechetical teachings note that although the Church allows Catholics to take abortion-tainted vaccines or medicines if no other options are available and the intent is to preserve life, vaccination itself must be voluntary.

Catholics opposed to taking the coronavirus vaccine needn’t necessarily submit a Catholic-specific letter but can use a more general Christian letter that does not contradict Catholic teaching. Given the divide amongst U.S. bishops and in the hierarchy in general about the vaccine, this may be wise.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) are especially out of luck because the Church has a pro-vaccine policy and its top leadership with a famous Doctor at the head has strongly recommended everyone get the shot. The Church has even gone so far as to broadcast that church officials should not sign any statements of religious exemptions forms about vaccines.

So, if you can’t get a large church to back you up, you can still base your objections on your own personal religious belief. There are several possible strategies:

1. State that you oppose taking any vaccines that are made, even partially, with aborted fetal cells.

2. State that you believe the scriptural concept that your body is the temple of God and that you should not defile it with any thing unhealthy and dangerous. State the VAERS data that there have been over 14k deaths and nearly a million adverse and damaging side effects that prohibit you from accepting this vaccine.

3. State that you believe God speaks to you through our conscience and warns about dangers to our health; that you feel nervous in your conscience about taking the vaccine.

Here is a sample medical exemption letter I received. It’s simple and short with some backup links:

“I request a religious exemption. “Each of the manufactures of the Covid vaccines currently available developed and confirmed their vaccines using fetal cell lines, which originated from aborted fetuses. For example, each of the currently available Covid vaccines confirmed their vaccine by protein testing using the abortion-derived cell line HEK-293. Partaking in a vaccine made from aborted fetuses makes me complicit in an action that offends my religious faith. As such, I cannot, in good conscience and in accord with my religious faith, take any such Covid vaccine.

In addition, any coerced medical treatment goes against my religious faith and the right of conscience to control one’s own medical treatment, free of coercion or force. Please provide a reasonable accommodation to my belief, as I wish to continue to be a good employee, helpful to the team.

You can also add the threat of legal liability to the company if they persist in this mandate:

Equally, compelling any employee to take any current Covid-19 vaccine violates federal and state law, and subjects the employer to substantial liability risk, including liability for any injury the employee may suffer from the vaccine. Many employers have reconsidered issuing such a mandate after more fruitful review with legal counsel, insurance providers, and public opinion advisors of the desires of employees and the consuming public. Even the Kaiser Foundation warned of the legal risk in this respect.

The above link at Life Site News contains other sample letters of religious exemption and there is advice offered by The Healthy American. If you have had any side effects from a previous vaccine, try to find a doctor who will give you a medical exemption, which is harder for an employer to fight.

The legal fight

A lot of anti-mandate sites are predicting that many lawsuits will be filed against this federal/OSHA mandate. Sadly, the small corporations and business that fall under the mandate usually don’t have the resources to mount a major legal challenge. The Cato Institute summed up the major legal angles the Biden administration will face in court:

Although much of the rhetoric surrounding the new federal vaccine mandates focuses on individual rights—“how dare they force me to inject something into my body?”—the government can generally regulate its own employees, or those it funds with Medicaid/ Medicare dollars, so the strongest legally cognizable claims there are for people with valid religious or medical objections. And the latter has to include natural immunity, which provides more robust and durable protection against COVID-19 than any vaccine.

But the more systemic problem comes with the mandate imposed on businesses, requiring all those that employ more than 99 people to have their employees vaccinated. That private sector mandate, which potentially affects more than 100 million people, presents a constitutional triple threat.

First, there’s a separation of powers issue in that this sweeping new regulation is being imposed by presidential diktat, with related claims about the proper scope of OSHA’s statutory authority and whether Congress can even delegate such broad power to the executive branch. There’s also a further related administrative law claim regarding President Biden or OSHA acting in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner given the serious questions about whether the mandate is drawn with enough care given the science regarding viral spread and harm, the threat to the vaccinated population from the unvaccinated, whether the testing regime alternative does anything other than create burdens in an attempt to coerce vaccination, the failure to consider natural immunity (again), and other policy details.

Second, even if the executive branch is permissibly interpreting the relevant federal laws, these kinds of impositions are hardly a regulation of interstate commerce (or the use of any other constitutionally enumerated power): states have general police powers to regulate for public health and safety, but the feds don’t. A vaccine mandate as a condition of running a business is even further removed from commerce than a mandate to buy health insurance, which the Supreme Court held wasn’t justified by the Commerce Clause. And remember that the mandate is being forced even on businesses that operate wholly in state, and on employees as employees, not as travelers or users of the channels of interstate commerce.

Third, forcing private businesses to do the government’s dirty work isn’t a “proper” means of effectuating the goal of limiting the pandemic. Again as in the Court’s ruling in the first Obamacare lawsuit, which found no independent power to compel noncommercial intrastate activity as part of a larger regulatory scheme — what Randy Barnett eloquently called “commandeering the people” — the federal government can’t now commandeer businesses to impose mandates on individuals that it can’t impose directly.

Liberty Counsel has a large trove of legal and medical information about coronavirus vaccines that is regularly updated. America’s Frontline Doctors also has a list of statements from different faith leaders (Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical/Non-denominational Christian) which can be used to support religious exemptions or help formulate a person’s exemption. And if youlive in Idaho, there’s a great organization that is building to fight back against these issues: https://standupforidaho.org/ Support them.