Dear friends, A few weeks ago, we asked you to help us raise $50,000 for True North Legal, Minnesota Family Council’s legal initiative. Boy, did you come through! We ended up raising more than $55,000 before year-end to help protect Minnesotans who need legal assistance in the areas of life, family, and religious freedom! I want to share exactly how those donations are *already* being put to work to benefit the religious freedom of all Minnesotans. Just a few weeks ago we sent a charge to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on behalf of a Minnesota employee for religious discrimination with respect to vaccine mandates (read the charge here). But there are many legal battles with respect to religious freedom and vaccine mandates in the offing, and with your help True North Legal will keep fighting for religious freedom on behalf of other Minnesotans who need legal help. Just this week, Minnesota Family Council joined 29 other state family policy councils in submitting a friend of the court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to oppose the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate. The brief, filed on January 3, 2022, urges the Supreme Court to protect religious freedom and oppose this sweeping and unchecked mandate, which requires COVID-19 vaccination for all employees at organizations with 100 or more employees, with little to no regard for the religious liberty interests of American citizens. In November, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under the Biden Administration issued a vaccine mandate for the aforementioned employers. It did so without the approval of Congress and without even allowing for public comment, which is a key part of the rule-making process. Because the mandate circumvented these critical checks, our brief argues that the mandate “undermines rule-of-law values, for it puts important policy decisions in the hands of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats […]” More importantly, by placing this power in the hands of an unelected agency, the mandate poses a grave threat to religious freedom. “In the last 20 years,” says the brief, “[the U.S. Supreme Court] has repeatedly had to step in to protect religious exercise from agency hostility.” The OSHA vaccine mandate is evidence of this continued hostility, as it did not offer any guidance for religious employers or employees. Rather, it creates a potential religious conflict with its mandate, and then “places responsibility for that conflict in the lap of the employer.” The issue here is not vaccines, but vaccine mandates that infringe on sincerely-held religious beliefs. This sweeping mandate by OSHA both exceeds the agency’s authority and backhands religious freedom, a bedrock value of our nation. More news is expected from the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming weeks. In the meantime, True North Legal and MFC will continue to be a local resource for Minnesotans and an advocate for religious freedom. |
