For months they worked tirelessly in hospitals and operating rooms during the pandemic. They were hailed as heroes by politicians, the media, and the public. They took precautions, tested, and did their jobs. Then a supposed miracle drug appeared to great fanfare that was relentlessly pushed by Big Pharma and the public health complex. Those who expressed reservations were vilified, intimidated, and fired.
One case, Does vs. Hochul, currently being considered for argument by the Supreme Court, could bring needed clarity and closure for millions of Americans whose bodily autonomy and religious beliefs were violated by the government during the pandemic.
The Trump administration has an extraordinary opportunity to further demonstrate its commitment to religious freedom and disdain for the appalling abuses of the COVID period, through the issuance of a Statement of Interest in the case from Solicitor General D. John Sauer to the Supreme Court. The high court will decide this month whether or not to docket the case.
The COVID shot mandates generated more fierce debate than perhaps any other public health decision in history. Dissenting doctors and scientists were deliberately silenced by the government, media, and big tech platforms to suppress legitimate debate about safety and effectiveness. We now know that the public was lied to repeatedly about the shot’s ability to stop transmission and infection to justify unprecedented, draconian mandates. Investigations also have shown widespread misinformation about hospitalizations and death rates. Mandates have now been abrogated, and the President is raising questions about safety.
These scandals, however, should take a back seat to the significant constitutional questions that remain from this dark period in our history, created by the shot mandates.
President Trump and his administration have made an unprecedented commitment to protecting religious liberty after decades of our “first freedom” being diminished. Those efforts became increasingly extreme during the Biden Administration.
The previous administration did little to address hundreds of attacks on Christian churches and sicced the FBI on Catholics. The Biden Department of Education sought to repeal religious-liberty protections for faith-based organizations on college campuses while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission tried to force Christians to affirm transgender ideology. The Department of Health and Human Services sought to prevent Christians who conformed to their beliefs on gender and marriage from serving as foster parents.
President Trump’s establishment of a Department of Justice Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias and other inter-agency efforts to prioritize religious freedom are welcome signals to the nation that those principals remain cornerstones of the nation, despite the efforts of militant secularism.
Across the country, courts at the state and federal level are righting the wrongs done to thousands harmed by the COVID mandates. Private employers are doing the right thing by compensating those they fired unjustly for refusing to be coerced into taking an unproven drug that violated their sincerely held religious beliefs. The military, school districts, and municipalities have recognized wrongs here as well.
The Hochul case now stands as an outlier. Though initially permitting religious accommodations to the vaccine, New York subsequently revoked that exemption, illegally preventing any healthcare worker to seek or receive any accommodation for their sincerely held religious beliefs. In a further affront to Christians and people of faith, days after the change in policy, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke from a church pulpit telling congregants that the shot was from God and that she swapped out her cross for a necklace that said “Vaxed.” She implored the people to be “my apostles” for the vaccine.
The federal courts in New York have suggested that establishing a process for religious exemptions would have been too onerous for private employers, given state-imposed mandates. They have also held that because the mandates don’t exist, the issue is moot.
From both a legal and practical perspective, the court’s rationale is nonsense. You don’t suspend the Constitution or other legal protections, like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because they are inconvenient or because state law somehow demands it.
One of the respondents in the New York case, Westchester Medical Center, has more than 3,600 employees, but only a smattering had applied for a religious exemption to the COVID shot mandate. None were offered accommodation. If they didn’t submit to taking the shot, they were fired.
Furthermore, courts should not ignore the harm done from violating constitutional rights because of some irrational judicial hope the abuse won’t happen again.
Additionally, the Second, Fourth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have held that contrary state laws must yield to Title VII non-discrimination requirements.
To add insult to injury, after filing suit against New York State and their employers, these fired doctors and nurses waited for a year for the Eastern District to decide that banning religious exemptions was somehow perfectly fine under the Constitution. In October 2022, the healthcare workers appealed that decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. It would be another year before they had their arguments heard.
It took that court another full year to issue an unsigned decision, just before Christmas, again denying these healthcare workers the ability to litigate their Title VII claims, despite numerous state and federal courts ruling in favor of similarly situated plaintiffs in the intervening time.
Now, it will be up to the Supreme Court of the United States to provide some clarity on these religious liberty and employment discrimination claims – if they take the case.
Some of New York’s healthcare heroes are perilously close to judicial oblivion. The Trump administration should urge the Supreme Court to right another COVID wrong and strengthen religious liberty advocating that these healthcare heroes have their day in court.
Legal clarity in the Hochul case will ensure that the grave abuses of the Constitution that were perpetrated by government and private employers during COVID ultimately will not stand.
Tom Basile is the Host of ‘America Right Now’ on Newsmax, conservative columnist, speaker, author of Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq and a former Bush Administration official. Follow him on X @Tom_Basile. Learn more at www.TomBasile.com
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Garcia.Arnel, CC via Wikimedia Commons)
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
