Twenty-six Navy Seals and nine Special Warfare service members have partially succeeded in challenging President Biden’s aggressive – “follow the science” – “no jab, no job” COVID mandates being imposed upon the United States military.
The group of 35 received a morale boost last week when Texas Judge, Reed O’Connor, ruled that a “Preliminary Injunction halting the enforcement of Biden’s vaccine mandates be granted.”
In his (PDF) ruling Judge O’Connor’s stated:
Our nation asks the men and women in our military to serve, suffer, and sacrifice. But we do not ask them to lay aside their citizenry and give up the very rights they have sworn to protect.
In this case, members of the military seek protection under those very freedoms. Thirty-five Navy Special Warfare servicemembers allege that the military’s mandatory vaccination policy violates their religious freedoms under the First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Navy provides a religious accommodation process, but by all accounts, it is theatre.
Admonishing to the political treatment of servicemen and women, O’Connor said:
The Navy service members, in this case, seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect. The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government with no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.
While reminding readers of the military’s existing vaccine requirements, The Washington Post cited First Liberty’s Michael Berry, saying:
The ruling sends a clear message to the Biden administration, to the Pentagon and to the Navy that our service members do not give up their religious freedom when they serve their country.
When WaPo asked Berry what they would do if the Biden administration ‘appealed the decision’, he said, “we will defend this as far as it needs to go.”
Last year, the 35 strong Naval contingents applied for exemptions to the mandates citing their Christian faith but had their request denied.
In response, a lawsuit ‘representing the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant branches of Christianity’ was filed on November 9, 2021, by First Liberty Institute, an organisation founded in 1997 to protect religious freedom.
Epoch News reported that the Seal group ‘sued the Biden administration for denying them religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.’
Part of the lawsuit (PDF) reads:
1. ‘Plaintiffs’ sincerely held religious beliefs forbid each of them from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine for a variety of reasons based upon their Christian faith as revealed through the Holy Bible and prayerful discernment.’
2. ‘Multiple Plaintiffs hold the sincere religious belief that all life is sacred, from conception to natural death, and that abortion is the impermissible taking of an innocent life in the womb.
3. ‘As a result of their sincerely held religious beliefs regarding life and abortion, multiple Plaintiffs are unable to receive any of the COVID-19 vaccines due to what they believe and understand is a connection between these vaccines and their testing, development, or production using aborted fetal cell lines.’
The Seal’s lawyers added:
Plaintiffs believe that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine that was tested, developed, or produced using aborted fetal cell lines would force them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs by causing them to participate in the abortion enterprise, which they believe to be immoral and highly offensive to God.
The partial win for the quasi-SEAL Team is the first successful pushback in a wave of legal battles against blatant authoritarian overreach.
The military is just one front in an uninvited war against life, light and liberty.
In a Twitter thread date stamped Jan 7, 2022, Daily Wire co-CEO, Jeremy Boreing, explained, “Tomorrow is an important, perhaps monumental day for our country. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments to determine whether or not to allow the Biden administration to coerce businesses to force their employees to choose a vaccine, workplace discrimination, or their jobs.”
The subject is yet one more dismal example of the current President and his administration’s gross indifference and slothful incompetence.
Since Biden’s coronation to the pinnacle of political power, a trail of bad optics spotlighting bad decisions has continued to follow the “build back better” career politician.
Such as the bungled Allied exit from Afghanistan, and his drowsy-eyed refusal to mandate the rescue of American citizens, and indigenous Allied personnel from the country.
Add in Biden’s poorly defined, open to interpretation, and therefore abuse woke supremacist, ‘Four Pillars against Domestic Terrorism.’
Now, the leader of the free world seems content with weakening the ranks of the United States military by strong-arming the very people he was “elected” into office to serve alongside and protect.
ABCnews stated last December that the Department of Defence could be set to boot ‘30,000 active-duty service members for refusing to be vaccinated.’
Numbers from December 12, show that the Marines removed 103 soldiers, while the Air Force shot down 27 members for refusing the controversial, questionable COVID-19 vaccines.
Politico recalled there were 12,000 U.S. servicemen and women who have sought an exemption from the CCP-19 mandates, strongly implying these are not likely to be granted.
Although limited, the legal win for the Seals offers hope to the broader American public concerned about government coercion trumping citizen consent.
Bravo Zulu.
