The ruling is the latest development in a 10-year battle.
QUICK FACTS:
- Judge Brantley Starr has ordered Southwest Airlines to take an eight-hour exercise on religious freedom with the Alliance Defending Freedom after the airline violated previous court rulings.
- The airline is now responsible for paying for the travel, meals, and training related to religious freedom training.
- Judge Starr ordered, “Because Southwest’s right to speak when implementing the Court’s injunction ensures a continued partnership in the future, and Southwest’s speech and actions toward employees demonstrate a chronic failure to understand the role of federal protections for religious freedom, the Court concludes that training on religious freedom for three lawyers at Southwest the Court finds responsible (Kerrie Forbes, Kevin Minchey, and Chris Maberry) is the least restrictive means of achieving compliance with the Court’s order.”
- “The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has conducted such training in the past, and the Court deems that appropriate here,” Starr wrote.
- Flight attendant Charlene Carter won $5.1 million in a 2022 lawsuit after she argued Southwest Airlines and the Transportation Workers Union of America violated her religious rights when she refused to pay employee dues going to the pro-abortion Women’s March.
- Carter left the union in 2013 after she discovered her dues were funding organizations contrary to her religious beliefs.
- After she left, she was still obligated to pay dues “as a condition of her employment,” according to National Right to Work (NRTW).
FROM THE COURT RULING:
- The court demanded the airline tell flight attendants that the company “may not discriminate against Southwest flight attendants for their religious practices and beliefs.”
- Southwest Airlines instead said it “does not discriminate,” suggesting that Carter’s claims were baseless.
- The court ruling also noted that the airline violated Title VII, which “forbids Southwest from discriminating against flight attendants for their religious beliefs.”
- “Southwest also sent a memo to its flight attendants the same day, stating that its employees must abide by the types of policies over which Southwest fired Carter and that it believed its firing of Carter was justified because of those policies,” the ruling explains.
- Judge Starr compared the incident to the Genesis account of Adam and Eve.
- “It’s hard to see how Southwest could have violated the notice requirement more,” Starr wrote. “Take these modified historical and movie anecdotes. After God told Adam, ‘[Y]ou must not eat from the tree [in the middle of the garden],’ imagine Adam telling God, ‘I do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden’—while an apple core rests at his feet.”
BACKGROUND:
- In another religious discrimination case, the Attorney General of Virginia is investigating incidents where Inova Loudoun Hospital rescinded employees’ religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Almost 100 employees were terminated from their positions.
- Among those fired were Virginia Walker, a charge nurse who received multiple awards for her dedication to life-saving care, and Rene Camp, a nurse with 15 years of experience in labor and delivery as a physician assistant IT analyst and software trainer.
- “They fired our nurse of the year for not getting her booster,” she said. “She was the most amazing asset we had [in the ER].”
