Judge Orders Lawyers to Religious-Liberty Training

For every employee who has been shunted off by his or her employer to a diversity and inclusion camp to get his or her mind readjusted to the corporate mores of Biden’s America, here’s a little tale to lift your spirits on this late summer day.  

A pro-life flight attendant named Charlene Carter, out of Dallas, quits her union because she disagrees with its ideology and politics (leftish) but finds out union fees are still taken out of her paycheck. She then discovers that union personnel travel to Washington, D.C., for the January 2017 Women’s March (infamous for its support of abortion and the ubiquity of “pussy” hats), and she believes they do so on her dime (union funds). (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Trump’s Speech Is Barred, but 303 Creative Remains)

She writes angry letters to the union boss and her airline, Southwest. Some are pretty juicy, containing disparaging language — “highly offensive in nature,” according to the airline — complaining about the expedition to D.C. and also about union support of abortion, and she includes in some emails to her boss photos of aborted babies. Southwest fires her for violating their social-media policy and harassing her betters.

She sues in federal district court for violation of her First Amendment rights, and a jury finds the airline discriminated against her due to her “sincerely held religious observances, beliefs, or practices.” It also finds that the union, the Transport Workers Union (TWU), went after her for criticizing union leaders, an activity protected by the Railway Labor Act, which governs the airline industry.

She was set to get $4.15 million from Southwest; $950,000 from the TWU. However, the judge, U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee, reduces the figure to $800,000 to align with federal limits on punitive damages. Still a nifty chunk of change. She also gets her job back.

It Gets Better

The judge orders Southwest to inform its flight attendants that the airline may not discriminate against flight attendants for their religious beliefs and practices. Southwest, however, sends out to its employees an email conveying the exact opposite. “The court,” Southwest writes, “ordered us to inform you that Southwest does not discriminate against our Employees for their religious practices and beliefs” [emphasis mine].

The judge’s order continues:

Not content with merely inverting the Court’s notice, 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 judge holds Southwest in civil contempt and writes for them the message they must transmit to their employees, verbatim. (READ MORE: Government’s Attack on Free Speech Can Only Be Stopped by Congress)

And he mandates that three in-house Southwest lawyers go get religious-liberty training — “[b]ecause … Southwest’s speech and actions toward employees demonstrate a chronic failure to understand the role of federal protections for religious freedom.”

And Better Still

And where does the judge send those lawyers? He sends them to get that religious-liberty reeducation from Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian group that has represented countless clients whose religious rights have been violated and whose recent high-profile victories before the Supreme Court include the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and 303 Creative v. Elenis. “The Alliance Defending Freedom (‘ADF’) has conducted such training in the past,” the court order reads, “and the Court deems that appropriate here.”

As is utterly predictable, the Left has released its hounds of hate. The Associated Press tracks down numerous legal authorities to argue with Starr’s sanctions, and leftist websites goose-step energetically to the party tune. Both Salon and the New Republic refer to ADF as a “hate group” in their headlines. 

But there is nothing to suggest that a legal group of one persuasion cannot instruct about its expertise in objective terms. ADF’s chief counsel, Jim Campbell, according to the AP, said this:

The judge’s order calls for ADF to provide training in religious liberty law — not religious doctrine. It is baseless to suggest that people of faith cannot provide legal instruction if their beliefs differ from their audience’s.

There are definitely opposing camps in the religious-liberty wars. Those on the right seek to enhance the religious liberty of the American people; those on the left seek to curtail it.

The Left would no doubt have liked the judge to send the Southwest lawyers to the latter, to a group that probably wants to restrict, possibly even eliminate, religious liberty in the workplace and in the public square. This judge seems to believe in preserving religious liberty in the workplace, and he sent the lawyers to a group that understands and respects the authority of the First Amendment, especially as it relates to cases involving free speech or the free exercise of religion.

The rest of us can enjoy watching the Left grouse about being sent to diversity and inclusion training.

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