A pro-life Catholic former CTA worker fired for refusing to take a Covid vaccine will be allowed to continue suing the transit agency for violating his religious freedom rights under federal law, because the CTA rejected his request for a religious exemption to the CTA’s vaccine mandat.
Kennelly said the CTA must do more to demonstrate that it had a “rational reason” for firing McCormick allowable under the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act, while allowing other religious objectors to the Covid vaccine mandate to continue working for the agency.
“McCormick alleges in his complaint … that CTA denied his exemption application for no rational reason whatsoever,” Kennelly wrote. “At this stage, the Court must credit that allegation.
“The Court may reasonably infer that a policy that purports to permit religious exemptions but then irrationally denies those exemptions to some small number of employees is not the ‘least restrictive means’ of curtailing the spread of Covid-19.”
McCormick had filed suit in 2023, one of the more recent in a spate of cases brought by people who accused a host of both government and private employers of violating their religious freedom rights by requiring them to either receive one of the government authorized Covid vaccines or risk losing their jobs.
While judges have rejected a range of challenges to such vaccine mandates, objectors challenging vaccine mandates on religious grounds generally have found greater success.
NorthShore University Health System, for instance, notably agreed in 2022 to pay $10 million to a group of employees who lost their jobs when the hospital system refused their requests for religious exemptions from that employer’s vaccine mandate.
Like the plaintiffs in those other lawsuits, McCormick, who is described as a practicing Roman Catholic, objected to what court documents described as “the connection between all three Covid-19 vaccines (in their origination, production, development, or testing), and the cell lines of aborted fetuses.”
“McCormick further believes that ‘his body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and to inject medical products that have any connection whatsoever to aborted fetal cell lines would be defiling the Temple of the Holy Spirit,” Judge Kennelly wrote, describing McCormick’s arguments.
According to court documents, McCormick cited those reasons in requesting an exemption from the CTA’s Covid vaccine mandate in September 2021.
“I cannot in good conscience accept an experimental mRNA gene therapy drug that includes the use of aborted fetal cell lines. These heinous acts contradict my religious beliefs,” McCormick wrote in his request for an exemption.
The CTA later denied that exemption request, apparently without explanation, and fired McCormick, allegedly replacing him with a ‘non-Catholic Practicing individual who received the vaccination.”
McCormick then filed suit in March 2023. The complaint asserts the CTA’s actions violated his civil rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; his rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment; and his religious liberty under the Illinois RFRA law, when they denied his exemption request without explanation, while granting other similar exemption requests.
The CTA has moved to dismiss the final two counts, but not the Title VII claim to this point.
Judge Kennelly sided with the CTA that McCormick’s equal protection claim cannot hold up in court.
The judge said McCormick notably accused the CTA of rejecting his exemption request, despite his assertions of sincere religious belief. But the judge said in this instance, McCormick failed to show the CTA “made a ‘class-base decision’ against him because of his status as a Catholic…”
However, the judge said on his RFRA claim, McCormick has to this point done enough to keep that claim in court.
He noted that under the RFRA law, the CTA must choose the “’least restrictive’ means of furthering” the CTA’s “compelling interest” of using vaccination to control the spread of Covid.
In this instance, Kennelly said, the fact that the CTA allowed others to receive religious exemptions means McCormick may deserve a chance to force the CTA to justify its decision to fire him.
“At a later point in this litigation, CTA may be able to offer evidence that it had a specific reason for denying McCormick's exemption application, and that this reason was an essential part of a policy that was, on the whole, the least restrictive means to effectively achieving the government's goal of Covid-19 containment,” Kennelly wrote. “For now, however, the Court concludes that McCormick has stated a claim for relief under IRFRA.”
McCormick is represented in the action bv attorney Frank B. Avila, of the Avila Law Group, of Chicago.
The CTA is represented by attorney Kevin R. Gallardo and others from its Department of Law.