Tag Archives: Liberty Council

The Fight For Freedom Continues

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On Monday, Just the News posted an article about the continuing fight against vaccine mandates by several marines [in spite of the fact that the DOD rescinded the mandate in compliance with the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act)].

The article reports:

Several members of the U.S. Marines are still fighting the U.S. Department of Defense in a lawsuit they filed over its August 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The DOD asked the court to dismiss the case after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was forced to drop the mandate by Congress. President Joe Biden, who strongly opposed repealing the mandate, agreed to repealing it when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law in December.

Liberty Counsel, the Orlando-based religious freedom legal advocacy organization representing Navy and Marine Corps service members, filed a motion with the court on Wednesday asking the court to continue the case. It pointed to statements made in the Defense secretary’s latest guidance that indicate he would enact another COVID-vaccine mandate in the future and to the administration’s argument that the district court has no jurisdiction over military matters, a claim the presiding judge refutes.

The article concludes:

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Repealing the COVID shot mandate for military members does not moot this case. Joe Biden and the Department of Defense continue to argue courts have no jurisdiction over the military, an argument that the courts have soundly rejected. The history of this case clearly demonstrates the open violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This lawlessness must end. Our military members who love God and America have been horribly abused and they must be honored again.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., filed companion bills that would require the DOD to reinstate any service member separated solely for COVID-19 vaccine status who wants to return to service, to credit all service members with the time of involuntary separation for retirement pay calculations, restore their rank if they were demoted, and compensate them for any pay and benefits lost due to demotions.

The bills also would prohibit the Defense secretary from issuing any replacement COVID-19 vaccine mandates without Congressional approval, require “general” discharges to be changed to “honorable” and require any records with adverse actions based solely on COVID-19 vaccine status to be expunged.

The vaccine has not been around long enough for us to evaluate its long-term effects. Why are we demanding that young people who are not at risk from Covid take an unproven vaccine?

Good News For All Americans

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On Saturday, Red State reported that NorthShore University Health System medical employees have won a lawsuit in which they sued the company because they were denied medical exemptions from the company’s vaccine mandate.

The article reports:

Now, in a big victory for freedom, NorthShore has agreed to settle with the employees. They agreed to pay more than 500 current and former employees $10,337,500. NorthShore is also been required to change its policy to allow religious exemptions and rehire anyone who was fired or forced to resign for not getting the vaccine. The Court still has to approve the settlement. Once the Court approves it, the employees can apply to get their jobs back at the same seniority level.

The Liberty Counsel which represented the employees cheered the victory.

This is the “first-of-its-kind class action settlement against a private employer who unlawfully denied hundreds of religious exemption requests to COVID-19 shots,” Liberty Counsel said. Its founder and chairman, Mat Staver, said it “should be a wake-up call to every employer that did not accommodate or exempt employees who opposed the COVID shots for religious reasons. Let this case be a warning to employers that violated Title VII.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

In many cases, the religious exemption claimed is due to the fact that scientists used fetal stem cells in the development and production of the Covid vaccines. Because many religions oppose abortion, the use of fetal stem cells from aborted babies is in conflict with those religions. The fact that the stem cells are from an older strain of cells does not matter.

The article notes that the decision on religious exemptions from vaccine mandates followed a similar decision in California:

This followed a decision, earlier in July from a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, which struck down a Los Angeles County Unified School District (LAUSD) COVID vaccine requirement for students, finding the district exceeded its authority and that the resolution approving the mandate clashes with state law by not allowing exemptions for personal beliefs.

This should serve as a big warning sign to companies who have done this or who would think about doing this to their employees ever again in the future.

Hopefully these lawsuits will pave the way for the end of the government insisting that Americans put chemicals in their bodies that they are not comfortable with. Our freedom is fragile, we need to continue to work to protect it.

A Hate Group That Claims To Be Fighting Hate

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Last week I posted an article about a donation given to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by George and Amal Clooney. The donation was made in response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was given ‘to combat hate groups. As I explained in the article, according to the SPLC, a hate group is any group of people who do not share the same beliefs as the SPLC. That is the danger of designating hate groups–there may be a few we all agree on, but there is also a lot of room for disagreement.

PJ Media posted an article yesterday reporting that the SPLC is being sued by some of the groups it has designated as hate groups.

The article reports:

Now, some of the groups slandered by this organization have begun to fight back — and it’s not just Christian groups like D. James Kennedy Ministries and Liberty Counsel.

“The SPLC, who made their money suing the KKK, were set up to defend people like me, but now they’ve become the monster that they claimed they wanted to defeat,” Maajid Nawaz, a British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam foundation, declared in a video announcing his lawsuit against the SPLC for defamation.

“They have named me, alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on a list of ‘Anti-Muslim Extremists,'” Nawaz said. “I am suing the SPLC for defamation and I need your help to win.”

The article notes:

In June, the charity navigation website GuideStar adopted the SPLC “hate group” list, marking each profile of the targeted organizations as a “hate group.” ABC and NBC  parroted the SPLC’s “hate group” label against Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) last month, and CNN published the group’s “hate map” online.

But the SPLC does not deserve this widespread trust, support, and publicity. The organization is a “cash-collecting machine” that spreads libels against religious organizations and has been connected to two domestic terror attacks.

There have been two domestic terror attacks that have connections to the SPLC. The first was the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.) early this summer (James Hodgkinson had liked the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC had attacked Representative Scalise for giving a speech to a white supremacist group.) The second attack occurred in 2012 when Floyd Lee Corkins III broke into the Family Research Council (FRC), aiming to kill everyone in the building. The article reports that during an FBI interrogation, the shooter said he targeted FRC because it was listed as an “anti-gay group” on the SPLC website.

The article at PJ Media centers on the lawsuit by Maajid Nawaz, a British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam foundation.

The article reports:

In the video announcing his lawsuit, Nawaz declared that “placing my name on a list like this not only smears my name, but also puts me in physical danger.” He noted that “the Left has descended into violence, whether that’s punching people on the street, throwing explosives and attacking people in protests and riots or assassination attempts on Right-wing politicians by leftist fans of the SPLC.”

Whatever their intention was at their inception, the SPLC has become a political hate group that has discovered a way to make money through lawsuits and gifts from people who want to feel good about ‘combating hate.’ It is my hope that a few lawsuits will convince them to find other ways of making a living.

Please follow the link above to the PJ Media article. It is chilling that an organization that claims to be fighting hate can be so misused by the political left. At the moment, the SPLC is being used as a weapon to stifle Christian beliefs and conservative speech. That is not a direction America should be moving in.