A group of Navy SEALs who successfully sued the Department of Defense in a case about the coronavirus vaccine mandate is accusing the Navy of retaliating against them.
The First Liberty Institute, which is representing nearly three dozen SEALs who have claimed that getting the vaccine would violate their religious beliefs, filed a motion on Monday seeking to get the judge to hold the Navy in contempt for disregarding the judge’s initial order.
Judge Reed O’Connor ruled in favor of the SEALs in early January, noting in a filing that “there is no COVID-19 exemption to the First Amendment,” adding, “There is no military exclusion from our Constitution,” and the latest complaint alleges that the Navy retaliated against the SEALs in recent weeks.
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It also tells the story of Navy SEAL 26, an anonymous member of the plaintiffs, who had his travel arrangements to attend a treatment program for traumatic brain injuries denied, though his request to travel was denied on Jan. 3, the day the SEALs’ initial judicial victory occurred.
“A substantial number of them continue to experience this harassment for being unvaccinated,” Mike Berry, the lawyer representing the SEALs, told the Washington Examiner in an interview on Wednesday. “We expect the Navy to follow the law. The Department of Defense is not above the law. And right now, they seem to be acting as if they are above the law.”
“We expect as this case moves forward that hopefully the Navy will begin to understand that, and they will conduct themselves accordingly and stop punishing our clients because of their religious beliefs,” he added.
Berry also said one of the other service members had been given the “opportunity to attend a traumatic brain injury clinic, and he was subsequently denied that opportunity by the Navy because of his vaccination status,” while another was “just past the halfway point of a special warfare training school that he was attending, and he was abruptly removed from the school and sent home because he had submitted a religious exemption request.”
The initial suit was not a challenge to the constitutionality of the mandate itself. Rather, the plaintiffs were arguing that the Department of Defense did not legitimately review their request for an exemption on religious grounds. There have been more than 13,000 such requests, but the Marines are the only branch to have granted any, and they have only approved three of them.
The lawsuit also points out that the SEALs, all of whom are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, “do not object to safety measures that reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in the workplace.”
Their religious beliefs prevent them from taking the vaccine because they oppose the use of “abortion” and “fetal cell lines in development of the vaccine,” believe “that modifying one’s body is an affront to the Creator,” have received “direct, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine,” and are opposed to “injecting trace amounts of animal cells into one’s body.”
Other common medications that were developed similarly include Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Benadryl, and Claritin. The Coast Guard has suggested that chaplains ask whether service members who are seeking a religious accommodation have taken any of those drugs, according to Fox News.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has fielded hundreds of requests for assistance from troops who don’t want to get vaccinated, none of which the organization has deemed worthy of support, founder and President Mikey Weinstein told the Washington Examiner in an interview on Wednesday.
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Weinstein blamed the “coward, entitled, mentally ill, sociopath [former President Donald] Trump” for the thousands of vaccine holdouts that represent a small fraction of the military. “Getting the vaccine,” he claimed, “shows a lack of appropriate fealty to this sociopathic maniac,” even though “Trump likes to claim credit for creating” the vaccine.
At least 95% of each active-duty service branch is fully vaccinated, while the remaining holdouts are either in the exemption process, had one granted, or will be discharged. As of last week, slightly more than 500 service members from the Air Force, Marines, and Navy had been discharged for refusing the vaccine, while the Army announced on Monday that it will begin separations “immediately.”
