Rich Welsh| On Thursday, US District Court Judge Steven D Merryday ordered a class-wide injunction that prevents the US Marine Corps from enforcing the Biden administration’s military vaccine mandate or discharging Marines who declared a religious exemption from the vaccine mandate and were denied.
Who the hell does the Biden administration think they are to deny a religious exemption? Especially to our military personnel!
The ruling gives relief to Marines who have been confirmed by a chaplain as holding sincere religious beliefs that force them to object to the vaccine, who submitted a religious exemption, were denied the religious exemption, appealed and had their appeal denied or their appeal will be denied.
First off, you don’t apply for a religious exemption, as it is your Constitutional right to declare a religious exemption. And constitutionally, they don’t have the right to deny you. Just because you joined the military doesn’t mean that you no longer have constitutional rights, specifically a First Amendment right to Freedom of Religion. Do the people running the country know we have these rights?
The judge wrote in his order that the woke Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, et al., are “PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED (1) from enforcing against a member of the class any order, requirement, or rule to accept COVID-19 vaccination, (2) from separating or discharging from the Marine Corps a member of the class who declines COVID-19 vaccination, and (3) from retaliating against a member of the class for the member’s asserting statutory rights under [Religious Freedom Restoration Act].”
Merryday’s order now includes the Marine Corps in the branches of the military that are blocked by court order from doling out punitive actions toward Marines who took religious exemptions from the unconstitutional vaccine mandate. At this point, the Air Force and Navy have also been blocked in the same manner for the same thing.
Just who do these woke numbskulls running the military these days think they are? Marines, Airforce, Navy and Army fight our enemies so that Americans have the right to declare their constitutional Freedom of Religion rights.
Judge Merryday considered the audacity of the Marine Corps issuing blanket denials to 99.7% of Marines who declared a religious exemption without ever examining each Marine’s circumstance personally. The Corps is required by law to do so.
It’s strange how the Biden administration does Olympic style stretching to charge its political enemies with violating the law yet they have no problem breaking the law themselves to cause harm to our warriors who stand on that proverbial wall and say to our enemies, “No way, man. Not today. Not on my watch.”
The judge cited that there were 3,733 religious exemption declarations as of August 4, and the Marine Corps granted 11 of them. That’s less than 1%.
Merryday wrote:
“The record shows that the other three-thousand-seven-hundred-plus religiously objecting Marine applicants are either denied already or rapidly proceeding to an apparently (on the present record) inevitable denial, and in either instance are awaiting forced separation from service; regardless of seniority; regardless of specialized skill and training; regardless of depth and breadth of experience; regardless of distinguished service; regardless of the current state of international turbulence and danger; regardless of the place and circumstances of each applicant’s service; and regardless of other considerations (for example, the difficulty in recruiting equivalent replacements). The record shows that the Marine Corps’s implementation of the Secretary’s directive enjoys at least two, even if no other, benefits to the Secretary and the Marine Corps: unmistakable clarity and unwavering consistency. But neither is what RFRA commands.”
“Any reasonable, informed, and disinterested person looking at this improbably skewed result, especially a person familiar with the law, will acknowledge readily that the authority rendering this uniform course of rejection is highly unlikely to successfully demonstrate the bona fides of the process that produced this monolithic series of rejections,” the judge added.
“Specifically in this instance and based on the current numbers, a reasonable jurist would conclude preliminarily…that the class of religiously objecting Marines is substantially likely to prevail on the merits of their claim that the Marines never received a fair and particularized evaluation ‘to the person,’ that is, never received the benefit of the process commanded by RFRA,” Merryday wrote.
And they wonder why recruitment is down in all of our armed forces. Between treatment like this with vaccine mandates and allowing transgenders among the ranks, no one wants to join. Can you blame them?
WATCH:
The Biden administration in under two years has compromised our fighting forces to a point where people are starting to notice.
