A group of educators claimed that the NYC Board of Education unfairly turned down their claim of religious exemption from the vaccine mandate. On Sunday night, the Second Circuit federal court issued a ruling that the Board of Education had inconsistently applied criteria on accepting or denying religious exemption requests.
The process requires that staffers seeking religious exemption provide a letter from a religious official explaining why their faith directed them against vaccination.
The court recapped the dispute: “On September 1, 2021, the United Federation of Teachers (“UFT”) filed a formal objection to the Vaccine Mandate on the ground that it fails to provide any medical or religious accommodations. After failing to resolve their dispute through mediation, the UFT and the City moved to arbitration. On September 10, an independent arbitrator (the “Arbitrator”) issued an award (the “Arbitration Award”) setting forth a process and standards (“Accommodation Standards”) for
determining, as relevant to this appeal, religious accommodations to the Vaccine Mandate. The Accommodation Standards allowed employees to request a religious accommodation by submitting a request that is “documented in writing by a
religious official (e.g., clergy).”
In their brief to the Second Circuit, the staffers led by Michael Kane and Matthew Keil argued that that the process was not consistent. They noted that two employees who worship at Church at the Rock in Brooklyn both sought exemptions and both provided letters written by the same pastor. One received an exemption; the other did not. Mayor de Blasio claimed that only Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses could receive religious accommodations, but in fact, the City has granted
accommodations to members of many other faiths, but it did so in an inconsistent way.
The court also discounted as evidence of discriminatory intent “Governor Hochul’s expression of her own religious belief as a moral imperative to become vaccinated…otherwise, politicians’ frequent use of religious rhetoric to support their positions would render many government actions nonneutral . . . .”
However, even the city’s brief conceded, meanwhile, that the accommodation process created by the arbitration was “constitutionally suspect.”
This was enough for the Second Circuit to conclude Sunday that the employees must have their requests reconsidered under a fair process. The court forcefully rebuked “the City from terminating Plaintiffs or requiring them to opt into the extended leave program while they are afforded the opportunity to have their religious accommodation requests reconsidered.”
Significantly, the court disregarded the teacher’s union-school arbitration agreement for judging fair accommodation to religious beliefs but insisted that the standards should be those that are set out in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This conclusion of the court indicates that it may consider the teacher’s union-school arbitration agreement about religious exemptions cannot mean that the plaintiffs give up their due process protections under the Civil Rights Act.
The ruling was narrow and did not strike down the Vaccine Mandate for the public schools. The court noted that they did not accept the argument that the Vaccine Mandate violated the religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The court concluded that the Vaccine Mandate was religiously neutral because it didn’t single out religious employees, but that the process of determining exemptions was fatally flawed. The case was sent back to the federal district court for resolution.
The fifteen plaintiffs include an Orthodox Jew, a Russian Orthodox Christian deacon, an evangelical Christian, and an individual who said his spiritual guides were Christ and Buddha.
