This post is free. Most of ‘em aren’t. For just $5 a month, you can receive everything we produce!
*****
This is the story of a state worker who gave up his job rather than get vaccinated. That’s what it is. We’re about to talk about it at greater length than we will the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other stories just like it, because the person in question happens to be a football coach. But all the basic rules are in play.
Like this:
—The state of Washington has a vaccine mandate for all workers.
—There is no “regular testing” option that allows a worker not to be inoculated.
—Religious exemptions may be applied for, but your chances of seeing that request granted are really, really low.
How low? Well, the Seattle Times recently reported that as of September, some 3,891 exemption requests on religious grounds had been filed by employees with the state of Washington. Total number of requests and workplace accommodations granted: 7.
I’m saying that Washington State football coach Nick Rolovich probably understood the odds. He wanted a religious exemption to allow him to coach and be in constant contact with an entire Division-I football program, including players and staff. And since he’s a coach, he’s almost certainly good with basic numbers, meaning he knew that the figures I cited above equate to a winning percentage of 0.0018 on religious exemptions.
So, in the end, Nick Rolovich got himself fired. He’s a state employee, since Washington State is most certainly a state school. He 100 percent knew what was going to happen, like it or not, agree or not. We all make our choices, yada yada.
And I’d leave it at that, except for his lawyer.
Rolovich’s lawyer says he’s going to sue. He says the termination is “unjust and unlawful.” You can always pursue such a claim, although it’s a hard one to prove, since the vaccination requirement is being applied across the board in an act of public health safety, and the lawfulness of such acts have been supported by the courts for more than a century.
But when the attorney, Brian Fahling, cited Rolovich’s “sincerely held religious beliefs” and added that Washington State and its athletic director, Pat Chun, were discriminating against Rolovich’s “devout Catholic faith,” he walked into my wheelhouse.
As it happens, I’ve been writing on Covid-related topics for — well, for too long. Recently, I dove into the topic of religious exemptions, since a lot of people who don’t want to get vaxxed are relying upon such claims to get them home. You can read that story here, if you’re so inclined, but I’ll short-cut it for you: No major religion in the U.S. opposes vaccination. The Catholic Church, since Fahling brought it up, spoke via the Pope himself on the topic. Pope Francis declared taking the Covid vaccine to be “the moral choice, because it is about your life but also about the lives of others.” Locally, bishops in most major cities have instructed their priests not to have any part of writing letters on behalf of parishioners who seek religious exemptions.
Further, state and local health authorities have had the legal backing to enforce vaccine mandates, as long as they’re applied equally, dating back to a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling during the smallpox crisis. You may not remember smallpox; that’s because vaccines largely wiped the disease off the face of the Earth.
Enough of that. Religious exemptions are rare, is the point. Nick Rolovich knew it, just as he knew that the moment was coming when his position against being vaccinated would put him at a crisis point. If he’s got a political view on all this that he isn’t expressing, we may eventually learn it. In the meantime, Rolovich is what he is: a state worker who made a choice whose consequences he completely understood. Let’s not make more of it — or less of it — than it is.
Bravo, sir! Bravo!!