September 28, 2021 - 1:53 PM
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul claimed this week that there is no “legitimate” request for a religious exemption from her vaccine mandate, which requires all state employees and healthcare workers to get the shot, because no “organized religion” has asked for one.
But Hochul’s reasoning is baseless. From the government's perspective, the legitimacy of religious beliefs is not dependent upon organized religion.
She’s also flat-out wrong about religious exemption requests. While there may certainly be people who seek to use religion as a way out of the vaccine mandate, there are plenty of other well-meaning people of faith who have reasonable ethical concerns about how the vaccines were developed. Fetal cell lines, or cells grown using aborted fetal cells collected decades ago, were used in the testing and development of Pfizer's and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines and during the production of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine. Thus, there are some in the pro-life movement who see vaccination against COVID-19 as an indirect benefit of abortion that they cannot bring themselves to condone.
It is true that church leadership, specifically within the Catholic Church, has ruled that it is morally acceptable to get the vaccines regardless of how they were developed. But that does not mean individual practicing believers who dissent from the church’s decision on this matter have lost the right to be heard. That’s not how religious freedom works.
Hochul might disagree with religious persons’ reasoning, but she does not have the right to dismiss their concerns outright and force them to violate their consciences. If she keeps moving in this direction, it's only a matter of time before the courts tell her the same thing.
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