A federal court has sided with college athletes seeking a religious exemption from a university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, preventing the school from enforcing the mandate against the plaintiffs.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sided with a group of 16 student-athletes at Western Michigan University, upholding a lower court decision finding that the school violated their First Amendment rights by denying their requests for religious exemptions from the requirement that all student-athletes take the coronavirus vaccine.
The decision noted that “in some cases, the university denied the student-athlete’s application” for a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate while in other cases, “the university failed to respond but still barred the student-athlete from further participation in college sports.” In August, the students sued the school’s board of trustees, its athletic director and its “associate director of institutional equity” for preventing them from participating in sports while the school considered their requests for religious exemptions on an individual basis.
In the ruling, published Thursday, the judges concluded that “by conditioning the privilege of playing sports on plaintiffs’ willingness to abandon their sincere religious beliefs, the university burdened their free exercise rights.”
The appellate court ruling comes after university officials appealed the lower court ruling handed down on Sept. 13 by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, asking both the district court and appellate court to stay the injunction allowing the 16 unvaccinated plaintiffs to participate in sports as the legal proceedings continued. Both the district court and the appellate court declined to do so.
The three-judge panel cited its unanimous prediction that “the free exercise challenge will likely succeed on appeal” as the justification for its decision to deny the appeal.
“The university put plaintiffs to the choice: get vaccinated or stop fully participating in intercollegiate sports. The university did not dispute that taking the vaccines would violate the plaintiffs’ ‘sincerely held Christian beliefs.’ Yet refusing the vaccine prevents plaintiffs from participating in college sports, as they are otherwise qualified (and likely recruited) to do.”