Good news: 26 states have fully vaccinated at least half of all their residents. Bad news: Hospitals are still filling up along with their ICUs. The US vaccination rate puts it last among Group of 7 nations in the percent of the population that has gotten at least one dose of vaccine.
Today's post is going to have one topic since I got sucked into a very interesting article on an issue I've wondered about here before. What constitutes a religious exemption in terms of vaccination? Virtually all the major denominations have no prohibition on vaccinations. This means people are falling back on their "personal faith." Some private employers are taking a hard line here. United Airlines will put religiously exempt employees on unpaid leave as safety and testing procedures are developed and put in place.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs that are "sincerely held." I'm afraid that doesn't clear things up much for me. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that religious exemptions don't have to be recognized by an organized religion and can be beliefs that are new, uncommon, or "seem illogical or unreasonable to others." That opens things up a lot except that exemptions cannot be based only on social or political beliefs. This puts employers in the potentially awkward place of having to distinguish between primarily political objections from people who also happen to be religious and objections that are truly religious. Vermont removed its vaccine exemption for non-religious personal beliefs in 2016. After that, the percent of kindergarten students with religious exemptions went from 0.5 to 3.7, suggesting that parents were taking advantage of religious exemptions when they were the only means of exemption available.
So how would you evaluate the Paducah, Kentucky couple who cite faith as one of "many" reasons they don't want the vaccine. Among the other reasons are their perception that they vaccine was rushed, their reading about the vaccine's remote connection to abortion, and the similarities to the biblical "mark of the beast," a symbol associated with the Antichrist. They say that they are not overtly worried about the virus itself.
If you, like me, were wondering about buying exemptions online, they are readily available. There are multiple websites offering exemption letters. A Texas evangelist will provide letters online in exchange for a donation. A California megachurch is offering a letter to anyone who checks a box saying that they are a "practicing Evangelical that adheres to the religious and moral principles outlined in the Holy Bible." Such letters are not required but can be used to bolster claims of personal faith.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't? The rest of us are the ones who will be damned in the others don't get vaccinated.
1 comment:
They all are likely to get antibodies one way or another, it will just take longer. So far it doesn't look like there has been anyone too rural, too pure thinking or too saved to escape this. I do believe that no-one should be forced to have the vaccine but I also believe that it's not unreasonable for employers to require it unless the employee is totally working from home and doesn't meet the public. I don't mind people being a danger to themselves but I'd rather they weren't a danger to others.
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