The Daily Escape:

Coast Guard Beach,  Cape Cod MA – October 2021 photo by Anna Olivera Alabarg

From Military.com:

“US service members should have the right to refuse the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement on conscientious grounds, the Catholic Church’s Archdiocese for the Military Services said Tuesday.”

The statement by Archbishop Timothy Broglio focuses on potential objections over the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were tested using an abortion-derived cell line. That type of a link has been for centuries considered remote material cooperation with evil and is never sinful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was developed, tested, and is produced, with abortion-derived cell lines. That vaccine is, therefore, more problematic.”

That’s the Catholic Church’s overriding position on Covid vaccines. Since the military has the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines available, no military member needs to take the J&J shot. Where Archbishop Broglio goes off the rails is with this:

“….no one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience.

Individuals possess the “civil right not to be hindered in leading their lives in accordance with their consciences.”

Even if an individual’s decision seems erroneous or inconsistent to others, conscience does not lose its dignity. This belief permeates Catholic moral theology as well as First Amendment jurisprudence. As stated by the United States Supreme Court, “[R]eligious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

So, every Catholic in the military has a vaccination hall pass from the Archbishop from taking a vaccine that is “never sinful”? The curious thing is that Catholics are the most vaccinated group in the US, according to a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center.

Should religious exemptions from vaccine mandates really be a thing? Exceptions were designed to protect religious faith. But where vaccines are concerned, they often seem to be used in bad faith, as a way to get around complying with a public health requirement.

Some Constitutional history from Wired: The First Amendment restricts the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. For much of our history, there were no religious exemptions from secular laws that applied to everyone. As the Supreme Court observed in 1879, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Congress couldn’t tell you what to believe, the Court ruled, but it can tell you what to do.

By the early 1970s, the justices carved out space for religious exemptions. They ruled that if a superficially neutral law conflicted with a religious command, the government would have to meet the “strict scrutiny” test by showing that it had a “compelling interest” in enforcing the law.

In 1990, the Court narrowed its thinking. In a case involving members of a Native American Church who took peyote as part of religious ceremonies, the Court held that religion doesn’t give someone the right to challenge a “generally applicable” law. Ruling otherwise, wrote the conservative Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” An example of a civic obligation that Scalia cited for his slippery-slope argument: compulsory vaccination laws.

In fact, religious opposition to vaccines is rare. In 2013, John D. Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and practicing Catholic, surveyed a wide range of world religions and couldn’t find any that had anti-vaccine teachings, except for the Christian Scientists, who teach that the material world, including disease, is an illusion. And the way to overcome disease is through prayer, not medicine or vaccination.

In the 1960s and ’70s, as vaccine mandates for diseases like measles and polio proliferated, a wave of state laws enabled religious opt-outs. Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of exemption.

As Aaron Blake asks in the WaPo: How long before Republicans’ coronavirus vaccine skepticism and anti-mandate fervor makes the next logical jump – to the other vaccines that have been mandated for many years?

It’s already happened. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan tweeted:

“Ohio should ban all vaccine mandates”

Jordan supposedly is vaccinated. But apparently, he wants not only Covid, but whooping cough and measles to be spread as far and wide as possible.

It seems likely that the US will end up with fewer vaccine requirements in some places than we had before this pandemic that has killed over 700,000 people. You know, the one that we have vaccines for.

We live in a country where there’s no agreement on what constitutes the common good.