Supreme Court temporarily blocks order requiring Navy to deploy unvaccinated forces

[Polybius]

Source: CNN

(CNN)The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to temporarily freeze a lower-court opinion requiring the Navy to deploy special operations forces even though they have refused to get vaccinated for Covid-19.

The court's order means that while special operations forces -- including more than two dozen Navy SEALs -- continue to challenge the Navy's vaccine mandate on religious grounds in court, they will not be actively deployed or punished for their position.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Alito, writing for himself and Gorsuch, said that he agreed that the Navy had a "compelling interest" in preventing Covid-19 infection from "impairing its ability to carry out its vital responsibilities" but that it's "summary rejection" of requests for religious exemptions was by "no means the least restrictive means" for furthering its interests. He said the challengers "who have volunteered to undertake demanding and hazardous duties to defend our country" had been treated "shabbily" by the Navy.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/25/politics/navy-covid-supreme-court-seals/index.html

[aquamarina]

1. About time.

And once again Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch demonstrate for all to see that they know absolutely nothing about how the US military operates.

[PatSeg]

2. Anyone serving in the military

receives multiple vaccinations and as far as I know, it is not optional. It would seem to me that refusing a mandatory vaccine would be a refusal to follow orders. Seems like a no-brainer to me. In what kind of military do the soldiers get to pick and choose which orders they will follow?

[LiberalFighter]

4. And they receive shots or medical treatment as an adult the religious exemption doesn't wash.

[PatSeg]

5. And if they sincerely did have religious objections,

they knew what the military requirements were when they signed up. They should have opted out then. It is not like they were drafted.

[LiberalFighter]

6. And demonstrates that the military does not have the best and the brightest.

[PatSeg]

7. Oh, I think it is those alien brain worms

They've infested people from all areas of life, even the military!

[Ray Bruns]

3. It really doesn't matter. These guys have fucked themselves and their careers,

No one will let the enlisted re-enlist and the officers will eventually be forced out.

The navy has a long memory.

[TomCADem]

8. This Dissents Highlight The Hypocrisy of "Originalism"

The right wing often touts how they are "originalists" claiming that they adhere to a type of judicial interpretation of the US Constitution, which aims to follow how it would have been understood or was intended to be understood at the time it was written. Yet, I am sure that following the Revolutionary War during which George Washington ordered his troops to be immunized against small pox by being given cow pox that none of the founders would think that the Supreme Court could dictate how President Washington could deploy his troops.

How Crude Smallpox Inoculations Helped George Washington Win the War

When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for independence from the British, and a second for survival against smallpox. Because Washington knew the ravages of the disease firsthand, he understood that the smallpox virus, then an invisible enemy, could cripple his army and end the war before it began.

That’s why Washington eventually made the bold decision to inoculate all American troops who had never been sickened with smallpox at a time when inoculation was a crude and often deadly process. His gamble paid off. The measure staved off smallpox long enough to win a years-long fight with the British. In the process, Washington pulled off the first massive, state-funded immunization campaign in American history.


* * *

Fast forward to 1775, when Washington took the reins of a newly formed Continental Army laying siege to British-held Boston. That summer, smallpox was running rampant through Boston and one of Washington’s first orders of business was to safeguard his troops from a potentially debilitating outbreak.

“Washington knew what smallpox was like and he knew how it could incapacitate his Army,” says Elizabeth Fenn, a professor of early American history of the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82.