9th Circuit Upholds $7.8 Million BART Verdict as Vaccine Battles Redefine “Religious Liberty”

[Stan]

A federal appeals court backed fired transit workers, but the legal fight highlights how vaccine disputes have drifted far from the original meaning of religious freedom.

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[Asia Joe]

The legal victory for the BART workers underscores a profound transformation in American religious liberty law that has taken place over the past 5 years. For most of the nation’s history, religious accommodation did not mean dodging public health mandates. Historic religious exemptions centered on core matters of worship, sacred ritual, and non-negotiable spiritual duties. Early Americans fought for exemptions from mandatory military service, church taxes, or courtroom oaths that violated strict biblical commands against swearing. When public health rules like smallpox vaccination arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courts treated them as universal civic protections rather than religious battlegrounds. The Free Exercise Clause protected the soul, the altar, and the pulpit from state intrusion, not personal medical autonomy from standard civic obligations.

The modern paradigm of using religious accommodation to challenge vaccine mandates chips away at that constitutional foundation. By reframing religious freedom as an individual right to veto workplace health policies, the law turns freedom to practice one’s own faith into a consumer-style personal preference. Historic free exercise protected individuals when the state compelled them to violate clear religious sacraments or forced them to confess secular creeds. Converting this profound shield into a convenient instrument for avoiding vaccine divorces the doctrine from the sacred obligations that gave it unique moral authority in 1791 and 1868.

This is not to say there aren’t personal health reasons and concerns about vaccines, but simply applying a religious concern because there’s a “box for it” on the form misshapes what liberty means for those who have very real practice concerns. I know there are those who will argue that these particular vaccines violate their sincerely held religious beliefs that they suddenly discovered during COVID-19, but it tends to cheapen and call into question the entire range of religious practice that many have fought to protect over the past two-and-a-half centuries.

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But the reason people are checking this box now is because vaccines have CHANGED. 

1) Almost all of them now contain Mrna tech. The President of Maderna said on a TED talk, that these change your DNA. 

2) Almost all of these vaccines are cultured from aborted fetus tissue, from abortions. 

Now those may not be compelling liberty issues to this author, however, they are very compelling to some people. Let's not shame those people or invalidate their feelings because they believe these are real issues.