Liberty Counsel filed a reply brief and additional affidavits supporting the need for immediate relief for plaintiffs from all five branches of the military, federal employees, and federal civilian contractors who have been unlawfully mandated to get the COVID shots or face dishonorable discharge from the military or termination from employment.
The preliminary injunction hearing for the class action lawsuit against Joseph R. Biden, the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security will be on Monday, November 15 at 9 a.m., in the Middle District Court of Florida. The short name of the case is Navy SEAL 1 v. Biden.
The military plaintiffs include two Navy SEALs, a Navy EOD Officer, a Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer, a Navy Chaplain, two Marine Lt. Colonels, two Marine Lance Corporals, an Air Force Major, an Air Force Technical Sergeant, an Army National Guardsman, an Army Colonel, and a Coast Guard Lieutenant. All of them are exemplary representatives of America’s military force.
Liberty Counsel’s non-military plaintiffs include a Department of Defense contractor who has conducted Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) quantitative and qualitative assessments and studies, whose assessments are briefed to DOD senior leadership to inform decisions on future employment, allocation, and procurement; a federal civilian engineer employed by a large military defense contractor that provides LCD screens used in United States Armed Forces aircraft; a federal civilian contractor employer whose company develops and supports military weapons systems, including current and next generation land vehicles for the Army and next generation Navy vessels; a federal nuclear contractor employee; and a Department of Energy civilian nuclear tech who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
All of these plaintiffs need immediate relief as they are now placed in the position of having to choose between their faith and serving their country or performing their job. For example, one federal contractor who has worked for 21 years was put on administrative leave on October 29, 2021, while appealing a denial of a religious exemption and will now be terminated on Monday, November 15 at 2:00 p.m.
Liberty Counsel’s plaintiffs hold sincere religious beliefs against the COVID shots, that their body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and to defile it is a sin against God. They do not want to participate directly or indirectly or otherwise be associated with the destruction of human life through abortion by injecting a product that contains or was tested or developed with aborted fetal cell lines. The plaintiffs have all submitted religious exemption requests but have been told there are no religious exemptions. For the military plaintiffs, they have been told that merely submitting such a request will subject them to dishonorable discharge. The federal employees and civilian contractors similarly have faced opposition, and none of the civilian contractors have received any guidance on where or how to file a religious exemption.
The COVID shots cannot be mandatory under the federal Emergency Use Authorization law (EUA). Dr. Robert Malone, who discovered in-vitro and in-vivo RNA transfection and invented mRNA vaccines while he was at the Salk Institute in 1988, provided an affidavit in Liberty Counsel’s brief. Dr. Malone testified, based on the statements from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the FDA letters concerning the vaccines, the “FDA regulated product labeled COMIRNATY is the only FDA licensed SARSCoV-2 vaccine . . . but it is not yet available for use in the United States.”
The plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion is protected under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). Regarding RFRA, the Supreme Court wrote, “That statute prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion unless it demonstrates that doing so both furthers a compelling governmental interest and represents the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. Because RFRA operates as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws, it might supersede Title VII’s commands in appropriate cases” (emphasis added).
In addition to RFRA, the plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion is also protected by the First Amendment.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Liberty Counsel seeks immediate relief for these military members, federal employees, and civilian contractors against these illegal shot mandates. The Biden administration has no authority to violate federal law and require the COVID shots for these military, federal and civilian heroes. It is despicable to see how our military heroes are being treated by this administration.”
