The lawyer representing a group of unvaccinated Navy SEALs said a recent judicial victory should send a message to the Department of Defense that it doesn’t have “the right to just walk all over somebody else’s constitutional freedoms.”
Mike Berry, a lawyer with the First Liberty Institute, is representing a group of roughly three dozen SEALs who wanted a religious exemption for the coronavirus vaccine, which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated for all DOD personnel in August.
Judge Reed O’Connor’s Monday ruling should inform the Navy that it is “no longer allowed to continue with its punitive and adverse actions that it’s [taken] against our clients with impunity,” Berry told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
“The Navy service members, in this case, seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect,” O’Connor wrote in a filing on Monday. “The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.”
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At the heart of the lawsuit is the military’s handling of vaccination exemption requests to Austin’s mandate for the coronavirus vaccine. No branch has granted a single religious exemption despite more than 12,000 service members applying, while thousands of medical and administrative exemptions were granted.
Berry noted, “We didn’t actually challenge the vaccine mandate itself. … What we challenged was how the Navy was applying the vaccine mandate — and specifically how it was applying it to those who have a religious objection to the vaccine.”
“If the Department of Defense is going to make medical and administrative exemptions available, they also have to make religious exemptions available. And the religious exemptions cannot be a complete sham process as they have been here with the COVID vaccine,” he added. “If I were the Navy, I would look at this opinion and say, ‘We need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how we’re going to implement this vaccine mandate in a way that doesn’t violate the constitution and doesn’t violate federal law.'”
Berry said the ball is now in the Navy’s court to figure out whether it plans to appeal the ruling or how to adapt the process to comply with the court’s ruling.
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Pentagon spokesman John Kirby declined to comment in detail about the ruling, only telling reporters on Tuesday, “We are aware, of course, of the injunction, and we’re reviewing it.” The Navy also declined to comment on the litigation.
Dozens of Republican lawmakers filed an amicus brief in support of the SEALs last month, and the America First Policy Institute, a policy group backed by former President Donald Trump, did the same in November.
