The lower court order forbade commanders to make any changes to military assignments based on a refusal to be vaccinated.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had urged the court to remedy what he called "an extraordinary and unprecedented intrusion intoA federal judge in Texas ruled in early January that the Navy must allow members of the elite special operations community to opt out of the vaccination requirement if they had religious objections. But the judge's order went further, forbidding commanders to make any changes to their military assignments based on a refusal to be vaccinated.
Three justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — said they would have denied the Navy's request. Austin said the restriction usurped the Navy's authority to decide when servicemembers should be deployed to carry out some of the military's most sensitive and dangerous missions. It required commanders to make assignments for servicemembers "without regard to their lack of vaccinations, notwithstanding military leaders' judgment that doing so poses intolerable risks to safety and mission success.
U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor issued the order on Jan. 3 in a lawsuit brought by 35 Navy Special Warfare servicemembers, including 26 SEALs, who said the mandatory vaccination policy violated their religious freedom. "The Navy provides a religious accommodation process, but by all accounts, it is theater. The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory. It merely rubber stamps each denial," he wrote.
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