Vaccines are not a threat to liberty. However, being forced to submit to taking medicine and/or a medical procedure that is both controversial and troublesome to many of us is.

Vaccine mandates are a violation of the unalienable individual right to liberty, endowed by God our Creator, which is prohibited by the American system of government.

Christian responsibility in America isn’t to follow the wishes, and especially orders, of whomever in a position of authority recommends a particular action.

Christian responsibility in America, to submit to the governing authorities (Romans 13:1), is to: a) vote, speak, and hold office so as to protect and defend the Constitution (i.e., self-govern), and b) follow elected or appointed representatives exercising legitimately enumerated powers which don’t violate State and individual rights or God’s law.

Forcing an individual’s choice of medical treatment, such as mandated COVID vaccination, is about as un-Constitutional and un-American as one can get.  It was the medical experimentation on Jews in Nazi Germany that resulted in the Nuremberg Code [1].

Furthermore, an Illinois law that’s been on the books since the 90’s protects individuals from being forced to accept any health care service that violates their conscience. The relevant section:

(745 ILCS 70/5) (from Ch. 111 1/2, par. 5305)
    Sec. 5. Discrimination. It shall be unlawful for any person, public or private institution, or public official to discriminate against any person in any manner, including but not limited to, licensing, hiring, promotion, transfer, staff appointment, hospital, managed care entity, or any other privileges, because of such person’s conscientious refusal to receive, obtain, accept, perform, assist, counsel, suggest, recommend, refer or participate in any way in any particular form of health care services contrary to his or her conscience.
(Source: P.A. 90-246, eff. 1-1-98.)

Vaccines do not reduce disease spread, immunity does.

A new study out of Israel described by Bloomberg as “the largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity – gained from an earlier infection – to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use” showed that the vaccinated were 13x as likely to be infected as those who were previously infected, and 27x more likely to be symptomatic. (emphasis added.)

Vaccines are for the purpose of inducing immunity, while reducing the impact of an illness as widespread public immunity develops.  Diseases like flu and COVID aren’t very good candidates for vaccination because with modern treatments, a) they aren’t serious enough for most people not to just conquer the illness on their own, thereby developing natural immunity, and b) viruses tend to mutate faster than we can safely develop new vaccines.

Vaccine-induced immunity, while worthwhile for some, is necessarily inferior to natural immunity, partly because of the measures taken to avoid producing the more serious symptoms of the illness itself.

Current COVID vaccinations have been rushed to market (the first “full” FDA approval of a COVID vaccine was last week [2]), with apparently substantial shortcuts and unusual [3] overlooking of severe adverse events. Never in medical history has a vaccine been developed and approved so quickly.

If you are now convinced, or already were, to defend your liberty (and those of other Americans) against heavy-handed government vaccine promotion, several legal organizations have provided sample letters to employers who are wrongly mandating vaccination in genuflection to current political despots or face losing their job.

Requests for religious accommodation by federal law must be in writing, and Alliance Defending Freedom [4] and other trustworthy sources have developed legally and Biblically sound template religious accommodation request letters below, including the most important objections reflected in law and recent U.S. Supreme Court affirmations of religious liberty.  We highly recommend these as a pattern for drafting such a letter to your employer.

Also provided below is a letter providing your pastor’s agreement to the religious objection, which can be submitted if you wish to further strengthen your religious objection. The America’s Front Line Doctors form provides a list of questions employers should be presented with relating to the assumption of responsibility if an adverse reaction should occur.

Resources:

ADF Sample Employee Request Letter for Religious Exemption to COVID Vaccine

ADF Sample-Pastor-Letter-Supporting-Religious-Accommodation-Request-1

GAB Religious Exemption Letter to Employer

Sample Student Request for Religious Exemption to COVID Vaccine

America’s Front Line Doctors: College Student Form

More templates and resources

We support your individual right to choose, as an American, to vaccinate or not.

Let us pray that God will use this effort to persuade businesses to protect the liberties of their employees against government tyranny rather than supporting it!

Footnotes:

[1] http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/nuremberg/

[2] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine

[3] By contrast, in 1982 Eli Lilly recalled the popular and effective drug, Oraflex, a drug for the pain and inflammation of arthritis based upon 61 deaths in Britain and 11 deaths in the U.S.  3,867 (of 9,470, or 40%) adverse event reports have been filed with the FDA for deaths of those receiving the single approved vaccination (Pfizer).   https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html

[4] https://adflegal.org/resources/covid19-vaccine-mandate

Chasco Middle School in Port Richey, Florida did what many presumptuous and foolish k-12 schools around the country are doing: The administration unilaterally decided to sexually integrate the boys’ locker room with no notification to either the boys or their parents. The boys, and shortly thereafter their parents, learned about it when an objectively female student who seeks to pass as a boy humiliated them when she entered the boys’ locker room while they were in their underwear. The boys immediately left the locker room and sought help from two P.E. teachers—Robert Oppedisano and Stephanie Christensen—who according to Liberty Counsel, “were powerless to respond, because administrators had placed a gag order on them, and told them that they could not answer the boys on these questions.”

To be clear, not even student and parental notification would make this unjust and foolish decision right. Providing no notification just made a lousy decision worse.

Liberty Counsel further outlined the outrageous nature of the Chasco administration’s decision:

Robert also objected to administrators’ order that he continue to walk into and supervise the locker room, despite a girl potentially being nude or undressed in that area. The administrators told him that the girl in question had “every right to use the locker room,” including the right to disrobe in the open locker area, and shower in its open showers, where Robert is required to periodically walk in and supervise. Robert will not knowingly place himself in a position to observe a minor female in the nude or otherwise in a state of undress. Now, Robert has been told by administrators that he will be transferred to another school as discipline for “not doing your job in the locker room.”

Now, as a result of the incoherent “trans” ideology, a male P.E. teacher could be fired for intentionally being in the presence of an undressed objectively female student if she’s satisfied with her biological sex and a male teacher could be fired for refusing to be in the presence of an undressed objectively female student, so long as she is dissatisfied with her biological sex. What if a male teacher is in the presence of a genderfluid objectively female student who, while changing clothes on a day when she’s “identifying” as a boy, suddenly “identifies” as a girl? Yikes.

Some questions for the Chasco Middle School administration:

• Do students have any right not to be seen partially or fully unclothed by students, staff, faculty, or administrators of the opposite sex?

• Should “trans”-identifying coaches be treated as if they were the sex they pretend to be? For example, should the objectively male swim coach who pretends to be a woman be allowed full access to the girls’ locker room? If not, why not?

• Do staff and faculty who believe it is profoundly wrong to see pubescent students of the opposite sex partially or fully unclothed have any rights?

• Why do we have any sex-segregated locker rooms and restrooms in public schools if objective biological sex has no intrinsic connection to feelings of modesty and the desire for and right to privacy when engaged in intimate bodily functions or changing clothes?

Ironically, while violating the physical privacy of children, the Chasco administration is trying to cloak its secret plan to sexually integrate private spaces by appealing to—you guessed it—privacy. But neither privacy policies nor laws prohibit the administration from notifying students and parents that the school has adopted—with no board vote—a new practice of sexually integrating locker rooms and restrooms and that boys and girls can expect that they will be sharing private spaces with persons of the opposite sex. (As an aside, I wonder how female faculty or administrators would feel if they were in their underwear in a women’s faculty locker room when without notification an objectively male colleague walked in.)

The brains behind this “trans”-cultic operation to violate the privacy of and humiliate students is Jackie Jackson-Dean who consulted with every pro-“LGBTQ”-advocacy organization she could find—including the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) government school indoctrination arm, ironically called “Teaching Tolerance.”

The weedy thicket of Dean’s recommendations include encouraging the school to participate in every pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), encouraging teachers to use incorrect pronouns when referring to students who masquerade as the opposite sex, and publicly praising teachers who affirm pro-“LGBT” orthodoxy (thereby implicitly shaming those who don’t).

Jackson-Dean’s Twitter account reveals she’s a hardcore, far-left pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” activist who loves the SPLC and opposes Brett Kavanaugh.

There’s an odd omission in her rainbow-adorned document. She neglected to mention this which comes right out of a document to which she links:

On the federal side, the Title IX regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Education allow schools to provide separate but comparable bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities on the basis of sex…. While there is no definitive national legal authority on the issue, federal courts in non-school cases have recognized a fundamental right to privacy or acknowledged the legitimacy of safety concerns in cases involving individuals undressing, using the restroom, or showering in an area to which a member of the opposite birth sex has access. Moreover, a federal district court recently asked the question whether a university engages in unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX or the Constitution when it prohibits a transgender male [i.e., a biological female] student from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for men on campus. The court concluded: “The simple answer is no.”

If adult coaches are required to be in the presence of partially or fully undressed students of the opposite sex who “identify” as “trans,” there remains no rational reason to prohibit adult coaches from being in the presence of partially dressed or fully nude students of the opposite sex who accept their sex. In short, the “trans” ideology has invalidated objective, immutable biological sex and its anatomical manifestation as having any relevance in separating humans in spaces where bodies are exposed.

I’ve tried to warn that the ultimate goal and logical outworking of the “trans” ideology is to eradicate all public recognition and valuation of sex differences. According to the “trans” ideology, all it takes to “identify” as the opposite sex is a declaration. No gender dysphoria diagnosis or experience of gender dysphoria, no surgery, no cross-sex hormone-doping, not even cross-dressing is necessary to identify as the opposite sex. Further, society is obligated to treat “trans”-identifying persons in all ways and in all contexts as the sex they declare they are. Therefore, a girl with intact breasts who identifies as a boy should be free to undress and shower naked with the boys, and a boy with an intact penis and testicles who identifies as a girl should be free to undress and shower with girls. A girl with intact breasts who identifies as a boy should be allowed to swim on the boys’ swim team wearing a boys’ Speedo. Male coaches who enter boys’ locker rooms should treat girls who pretend they’re boys and are changing no differently than boys who are changing.

So, now what would have once been too scandalous to even imagine is being or going to be required.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Chasco.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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As a nurse threatened with termination for refusing to participate in an unethical health care decision years ago, I have a special interest in conscience rights for health care professionals.

Over the past several decades, new threats to conscience rights have widened from refusing to participate in abortions to other deliberate death decisions like withdrawal of feedings from people with serious brain injuries, VSED (voluntary stopping of eating and drinking), terminal sedation and physician-assisted suicide.

Thus, I am pleased that the Trump administration recently announced the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division  in the department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to enforce “federal laws that protect conscience and the free exercise of religion and prohibit coercion and discrimination in health and human services”. The division specifically mentions “issues such as abortion and assisted suicide (among others) in HHS-funded or conducted programs and activities” and includes a link to file a conscience or religious freedom complaint “if you feel a health care provider or government agency coerced or discriminated against you (or someone else) unlawfully”.

Predictably, both Compassion and Choices and Planned Parenthood immediately condemned the new department.

In a recent fundraising email, Compassion and Choices states that:

 “This office (OCR) is not about freedom; it’s about denying patient autonomy. Under their proposed rules, providers are encouraged to impose their own religious beliefs on their patients and withhold vital information about treatment options from their patients — up to, and including, the option of medical aid in dying. And your federal tax dollars will be used to protect physicians who make the unconscionable decision to willfully withhold crucial information regarding their care from a patient and abandon them when they are most vulnerable.” (Emphasis added)

Planned Parenthood is just as adamant and includes other issues in their reaction:

“OCR is an important office within the HHS that’s meant to protect health care for marginalized communities, including LGBTQ people and underserved women. But the creation of the new “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division” paves the way for discrimination against people for a variety of reasons — be it their gender identity, sexual orientation, or decision to access a safe, legal abortion.” (Emphasis in original)

A SHORT RECENT HISTORY OF FEDERAL CONSCIENCE RIGHTS PROTECTIONS

In response to declining numbers of doctors willing to do abortions in the 1990s, efforts began to mainstream abortion into the health professions such as requiring abortion training for OB/GYNs, shifting training and practice into teaching hospitals and  integrating abortion into regular health care.

The National Abortion Federation along with Medical Students for Choice, pushed for change and in 1995, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education ruled that OB/GYN residency programs must include abortion training or lose accreditation.

That was overturned the next year with the Coats Amendment passed by Congress but  efforts to marginalize pro-life medical professionals continued, especially with newly passed physician-assisted suicide laws and well-publicized withdrawal of feeding tube cases like Terri Schiavo’s.

In 2008, the Christian Medical Association compiled a list of dozens of real-life cases of discrimination in health care, including doctors, medical students, nurses and pharmacists.

That same year, President Bush strengthened the HHS rules protecting the conscience rights of doctors and nurses to refuse to perform abortions.

In 2011, the Obama administration dismantled key provisions of the Bush administration conscience rights rules.

That same year, 12 New Jersey nurses faced firing for refusal to participate in abortion and had to rely on groups like Alliance Defending Freedom to bring a  lawsuit defending their rights. They were finally vindicated in 2013.

Right now, Wisconsin is considering a physician-assisted suicide bill that states a doctor’s refusal to prescribe the lethal drugs or refer the patient to a willing doctor “constitutes unprofessional conduct”.

Obviously, conscience rights cannot depend just on litigation, conflicting state laws or professional organization positions like the American Medical Association’s  or American Nurses Association’s that don’t vigorously defend conscience rights.

As explained on the Dorsey Health Care group website ,

“In January 2018, OCR announced a proposed rule to strengthen conscience-based protections for individuals and entities with objections to certain activities based on religious belief and moral convictions.”

“OCR now proposes to return much of 45 CFR part 88 to its 2008 Bush-era form, adding a requirement that certain recipients of HHS funds certify they comply with conscience protection laws and notify individuals of their rights thereunder”, enhance investigative and enforcement abilities and expands its enforcement authority to more conscience-protection laws than the 2008 or 2011 iterations. It will also “handle complaints [both formal and not], perform compliance reviews, investigate, and seek appropriate action,” including terminating funding and requiring repayment. OCR states “that a more centralized approach to enforcement of conscience protections is necessary in part due to rapidly rising complaints.” (Emphasis added) Comments on this proposed rule can be submitted by March 27, 2018.

CONCLUSION

Health care professionals with pro-life views have been under attack for decades. It’s more than just not being “politically correct”; the very existence of such health care professionals threatens the appropriation of health care by groups dedicated to promoting abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia as civil rights.

Without strong conscience rights protections like a successful Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, they will succeed in making health care termination-friendly.

But in the end, enforcement of the most basic civil right of health care professionals to provide care for patients without being required to participate in life-destroying  activities should not be determined by politics or popularity polls but by the acceptance of the universal principle of respect and protection for human life.

This article was originally published at NancyValko.com