![]() Some have gone to protests, signed petitions. ![]() Lately, these personal anecdotes have begun to focus on one topic in particular: whether your job can require you to get a COVID vaccine and whether your religion might get you exempted if your employer is clamping down. “There’s a rising desperation in some of these quarters to find a way out of these mandates,” Graham says. It’s hard for Graham to describe what she’s been hearing. In August, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined, without comment, a challenge to Indiana University’s rule that all students, staff and faculty be vaccinated.For the past few weeks, Ruth Graham has been logging on to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, to eavesdrop. Graham reports on religion for the New York Times. Legal experts say that right has been upheld repeatedly, including in a 1990 Supreme Court decision that religiously motivated actions aren’t insulated from laws, unless a law singles out religion for disfavored treatment. She freely explained her reasons for applying by referencing two Bible passages and listing vaccine ingredients she said are “harmful to the human body.” But she didn’t want anyone to know she applied for the religious exemption.Ī state’s right to require vaccination has been settled law since a 1905 Supreme Court ruling that upheld compulsory smallpox vaccination in Massachusetts. 1, said she was awaiting a response from the company’s human resources department on her request for a religious exemption. In Turlock, Calif., a preschool teacher was provided an exemption letter by her pastor, who offered the documents to those who felt taking a vaccine was “morally compromising.”Īsked by KHN via direct message why she sought the exemption, the woman said she didn’t feel comfortable being vaccinated because of “what’s in the vaccine,” then added, “I personally am over ‘COVID’ and the control the government is trying to implement on us!” Like other exemption seekers, even those who have posted in Facebook anti-vaccine groups, she feared having other people know she sought an exemption.Ī surgical technician working at Dignity Health, which has ordered its employees to be fully vaccinated by Nov. The distinction between religion and ideology is blurring among those seeking exemptions. Employers have the right to ask for supporting documentation, but employees’ religious beliefs don’t have to hew to any specific or organized faith. Employers “should ordinarily assume that an employee’s request for religious accommodation is based on a sincerely held religious belief,” the EEOC says. But the employer isn’t required to do anything that results in an undue hardship or more than a “de minimis” cost.Īs for the objection itself, the commission’s advice is vague. That might mean moving an unvaccinated employee to an isolated part of the office, or from a forward-facing position to one that involves less interpersonal contact. That’s just not right, here in America.”ĮEOC guidelines suggest that employers make a “reasonable accommodation” to those with a sincerely held religious objection to a workplace rule. Greg Fairrington, pastor of Destiny Christian Church, told attendees at a church service, “Nobody should be able to mandate that you have to take a vaccine or you lose your job. In the Sacramento, Calif.-area city of Rocklin, meanwhile, a church that openly defied Newsom’s COVID shutdown orders last year has handed out hundreds of exemption letters. Related: Hundreds gather outside Dallas’ Baylor hospital to protest vaccination mandates Schmedes did not respond to questions posed by Kaiser Health News via email. In fact, Pope Francis declared it “the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” In an increasing number of dioceses - Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York, among others - bishops have instructed priests and deacons not to sign any letter that lends the church’s imprimatur to a request for religious exemption. Yet the Vatican has deemed it “morally acceptable” to get a COVID vaccination. ![]() One U.S.-distributed vaccine, the Johnson & Johnson product, is made using a cell culture that partly originated in retinal cells from a fetus aborted in 1985. 19 Facebook post to direct health care workers “with a religious belief that abortion is immoral” to a site that attempts to catalog the use of cells from aborted fetuses to test or produce various COVID vaccines. Gregg Schmedes, a Republican state senator and otolaryngologist in New Mexico, used an Aug. Indeed, while pop-up anti-vaccine churches have long offered reluctant parents ways to exempt their kids from shots, these days churches, internet-based religious businesses and others seem to be offering COVID vaccination exemptions wholesale.ĭr.
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