Victory For Medical Workers In Illinois Over COVID Shot With Mat Staver – A huge victory for the medical workers in Illinois has finally been won! Medical workers who have lost their jobs for refusing to take the COVID jab are finally being compensated. Mat Staver joins us today to discuss this huge victory and more!

Air Date: 08/22/2022

Guest: Mat Staver

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

 Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live. We’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective.

And you just being here listening, just being a part of the program that makes you a part of our family, it makes you a part of our team, and you are locking shields with us to help restore America’s Constitutional republic. You can be the catalyst for a restoration of biblical values and constitutional principles right there where you live, right there in your community. First of all, in your own home, you as an individual studying those things, knowing those things and living them out, teaching them to your family, but then teaching them in your neighborhood, become a Constitution coach, start hosting those classes, Biblical Citizenship in Modern America or Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom or Constitution Alive: you can host those classes entirely for free. We give it all away. Get signed up today and become one of our Constitution coaches. We would love for you to come alongside us.

I’m Rick Green, America’s Constitution coach and a former Texas legislator. And it’s my honor to be here at WallBuilders with David Barton and Tim Barton. David, of course, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. Tim Barton’s a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And you can find out more about all three of us at our website, wallbuilderslive.com. That’s wallbuilderslive.com. That’s also the place to make the donation. Yes, the donation that I believe God’s putting on your heart and saying, hey, it’s time to invest in freedom. America culture is crumbling; it’s falling apart.

It’s time to start making some lives, fortune, sacred honor, type sacrifices to save this nation. That means lives, your time becoming a coach, just doing things to share this program with friends and family, whatever you can do with your time to invest in freedom. But fortunes, yes, donating, actually putting your money into freedom; and that means donating to WallBuilders Live. That allows us to reach more people with the program, educate, equip, and inspire them. It allows us to do our trainings. We train pastors, we train legislators, we train young people, we train Constitution coaches: all of that is expanded. We reach more people when you donate at wallbuilderslive.com.

And then, of course, sacred honor, honor is something we don’t talk enough about in our culture. We don’t instill it enough in our young people and in the culture itself. Sacred honor, the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. They were willing to stand for what they believed in. They were willing to speak truth no matter what it costs them. And we’ve got to be willing to do that today as well.

I sure you appreciate you joining us today. We got a great program lined up for you, I think an encouraging program that could be a Good News Friday, but it’s not. It’s not Friday. So we’re just going to have a lot of good news to share with you today. And our special guest is going to share some good news with you as well.

Alright, David, Tim, we got Mat Staver back with us when we come back from the break here in a little while. But I tell you guys, I know we went through two years of insanity, two and a half years of insanity, and sometimes you felt like, man, where’s the cavalry? When are we going to start winning some lawsuits against this crazy stuff, all these people being fired, people kicked out of the military? But some of our friends and these different legal organizations have been in the trenches all this time; a lot of defeats, but victories as well and we’ll get to celebrate one of those today.

David:

Yeah, some of the early victories we saw in the COVID stuff was when they were trying to shut down churches; and we got pretty quick results back from court saying, hey, the Constitution does not go to sleep just because there’s some kind of national crisis. Just because there’s a COVID shutdown doesn’t mean the Constitution shuts down. And so early on, we started winning those cases for churches.

But a lot of this, Rick, as you point out has dragged on for years now, whether you can require people to get a vaccine, whether you can cost them their job if you don’t respect their religious objections, etcetera. And we saw that in the government. And so those are the cases that really kind of hit early on was where the government was forcing people to do it. And we saw that with military, for example. But it’s taken a while to get the private business into there, where the private business has the right to tell people that you don’t have a conscience that were required to follow; we’re telling you to get an injection to get the jab.

And so now that’s getting into court. And as it turns out, Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel, has had a super big victory in the legal world. This will shake things in the secular legal world because of the settlement that they’ve reached on the secular legal world, not respecting religious conscience of its employees. And this is another indication that, no, the Constitution does not go away just because you happen to be a private business or because there’s a pandemic or whatever else. The Constitution stands across all time, all people, all groups in the United States. So this really is a huge victory that Mat Staver is going to tell us about.

Rick:

Well, let’s take a quick break then, guys. We’ll be right back. Mat Staver, our special guest once again, and a great, great victory, you’re going to love this story, so don’t miss it. Stay with us, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

PASTORS CONFERENCE

Hey, guys, it’s Tim Barton. And I want to let pastors and ministry leaders know about an opportunity coming up actually in the very near future. September 1st in the Dallas area in Texas, we are hosting a pastors’ conference. And traditionally we’ve hosted pastors’ conference, in fact, for decades we have. And we would take pastors to Washington DC, we would give them a special private after hours tour of the capital where pastors could go and firsthand and see some of the spiritual foundation of the nation, some of the pastors involved in shaping the nation. And we give them an opportunity to hear from congressmen and senators who were themselves Bible believing Christians fighting to make a difference in God’s kingdom there in DC.

But now we’re going to bring pastors to our collection in Texas. We know that God’s allowed us to amass this amazing collection of original documents that show the Christian heritage of the nation. We want to let pastors see that first hand and still talk to congressmen and senators and find out what’s going on in the nation for pastors and ministry leaders. If you want to find out more information, go to wallbuilder.com, you can click on the Initiative tab, go down to ‘Pastors Briefing’, click on that. And if you are a pastor and ministry leader, we encourage you to sign up and come join us in Dallas September 1st for our Pastors’ Briefing. We hope to see you there.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Always good to have Mat Staver from Liberty Counsel, Lc.org is the website, I urge you to donate. Help these guys. They are growing like crazy in terms of caseload. Not just growing, I mean overwhelming in terms of the need out there for protecting individual liberties. Mat, God bless you, brother, love you and appreciate all that you do. Thanks for taking some time because I know you are a busy man right now.

Mat:

Well, thank you, Rick. It’s very good to be with you always.

Rick:

Well, you guys had a huge, huge victory out of Illinois, this one dealing with health care workers not allowed to have a religious exemption for the job. Tell us what happened up there.

Mat:

Yes, this is a North Shore University health system. It has about 180 employees in Illinois. It has 140 locations, multiple hospitals. And in the fall of last year, they gave a mandate to the employees to get the jab or lose their job. And at first, they were considering the individuals, they didn’t really exempt them for religious concerns. And then they said, no, there’s no one that’s going to get an exemption for religious-based reasons and so they denied everyone. So it was literally a jab or job decision with no attempt to individualize the assessment of each one, no attempt to look at reasonable accommodation. It was just you either get the jab or you lose your job, period.

Rick:

And these were people that had worked all through the initial stages of the pandemic, I mean, they were willing to be on the front lines when there was no jab?

Mat:

Yeah, when there was no jab, when there was no PPE, they didn’t know what was going on with COVID. Obviously, if you go back, as we all remember, in the early part of 2020, we had a lot of misinformation, a lot of scare tactics, a lot of unknowns, and so these individuals went to work day after day after day after day. Some of those, obviously, did not know what they were going into, whether they were bringing a deadly disease home to their family, whether they would get it. But they went there day after day because that’s their mission, they love to be able to help people, they put their lives on the line.

When a lot of people were doing remote, they did in person, and they did that for months. They did that after the COVID jabs became available back in December of 2020, then early 2021, and they continue to work through all the different variants. And then it wasn’t until the fall of 2021 that in September, the mandates came down and some of those started happening from Joe Biden and then others on their own, and then some of them just joined forces and they issued these mandates.

And these mandates that North Shore did are very similar to other employers. Like, for example, Tyson Foods and others, they did not give the employees a chance to get a religious accommodation. They just gave them the option of getting the jab or losing their job. And so we have employees, we have nurses, for example, that have all kinds of stories that are our plaintiffs in the case that they were the sole breadwinner of their family, depended upon them for the income. One of them had a father that moved in who was ill, a son who was going through some other kinds of treatment and lots of different things in their lives and they were forced to literally make a decision between God, following their conscience or getting the jab and staying there at work and compromising and they lost their job.

So we sent a demand letter back in October, the hospital ignored it. We then filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a number of employees. And then we requested class certification because we learned that the employees that we represented represent about 520 other employees within the hospital system.

And so now here’s the amazing thing, is as we’re going through discovery, the law firms, which are very large law firms representing the hospital system, realized that they didn’t have a case, so we settled this case for $10.3 million. That is now going to be approved by the Judge. And then we’ll work out all of the notification for the class. That will give real compensation to those individuals who lost their jobs. Moreover, the policy is going to be changed. They can come back to their job. There’s no longer going to be a no religious accommodation policy. Every position will now be available for religious accommodation. So they’ll be able to come back, no loss of seniority; every position will be available for religious accommodation purposes. And then they also get a settlement of $10.3 million.

And it depends upon whether they are plaintiff, whether they lost their job, whether they did stay and they got the shot, but they didn’t want to get the shot. There are different levels of compensation, but it’s real money compensation. It’s not some little token like you get in many of these class action cases.

Rick:

Yeah, this is huge, Mat, and not only for these employees at this particular healthcare system, but this is a shot across the bow, across the country to say, hey, wake up, folks, you don’t have a case when you’re firing these employees and not giving them an opportunity for religious accommodation. So this could have a ripple effect for others, right?

Mat:

No question. This is a wakeup call to employers across the country that did like North Shore where they just did not acknowledge or honor their employees religious accommodation request. This was under Title VII. So Title VII actually covers all the different employers across the country. So different state laws will give you some different additional protection, but Title VII is going to cover everyone. So this is a wakeup call to all these employers.

And we have thousands of individuals we’re working with. We’re looking at additional class actions against some of these other massive employers that did the same thing. But the other thing, Rick, is it’s frustrating from our standpoint because there are law firms that exist and all they do for a living is employment discrimination law. And they sat on the sidelines, they sat on their hands, they watched as these people got abused. They got phone calls like we did, and they turned them down because they bought the rhetoric, they bought the lie of the CDC and the FDA. And then some of these other employment law firms, these for profit law firms, they miss-advised their clients, say oh yeah, you can go ahead and do this because we’re in a pandemic, pandemic is a difference. You pause your rights. Normally, you wouldn’t be able to do that, but a pandemic makes things different. No. There’s no pandemic pause button on the Constitution. There’s no pandemic pause button on any federal protected rights such as Title VII and religious freedom.

And so I think that what will happen, particularly for these for-profit law firms that make their living with employment law discrimination, they’re going to say, oh my goodness, we missed the train, sit on the sidelines. I think they’re going to get woke up and I think they’re going to get involved and that will have a ripple effect around the country. Justice will ultimately prevail, and justice is coming very appropriately to these people in Illinois. And it’s so appropriate that they are healthcare workers because they have been our frontline heroes.

 Rick:

You know, Mat, I got to tell you, I loved you before COVID and appreciated everything else Liberty Counsel has done over the years. But my respect for you, for your courage, for the organization, for the victories, for the willingness to step out in these areas has just gone through the roof because as you just pointed out, these big law firms, that this should have been their area of expertise, they should have been jumping on this from the very beginning, sat on the sidelines, they bought the lies. You guys didn’t.

You went into areas that weren’t initially you’re calling and what you were called to do and said, hey, this is an injustice, this is wrong, it’s unconstitutional. We’re going to defend these folks. So not only the healthcare workers, but all the military folks that you’re defending right now, it’s just been amazing. And I know I brag on you every time you come on, but this is why. It’s because you stepped out and did something that most people were not willing to do and you’ve saved a lot of lives as a result of that and also potentially saved the Constitution and brought us back from this brink of, like you said, pandemic somehow is a whole different world and constitutional rights don’t matter. I mean, they really believe this stuff. And you’ve brought this back to reality.

Mat:

Yeah, well, we saw that it was wrong. It was pretty easy. You didn’t have to be a brain scientist to figure that out. It’s wrong. It was unlawful. And we have the ability to do something about it. So we’re not going to sit on the sidelines and buy all this rhetoric and lies that were coming from Anthony Fauci and others like him. We knew that this was wrong, and we got so many calls, and the calls were so incredibly heart-wrenching of these people that had such amazing stories and so faithful, and then their employers just abandoned them and betrayed them.

And we’re just not going to sit by and allow that to happen. We sought justice, and we got justice for these individuals and these health care workers. And we have others that we’re working with as well. And we’re ready to help anybody else who’s out there working with these individuals because they all need justice.

Rick:

Lc.org is the website. If you need help, go there for that. If you want to help, go there and make the contribution. Because bottom line is, Mat’s having to hire tons of new attorneys, have more affiliate attorney training, all these different things that are happening, it takes dollars. This is a huge, huge process, so please consider going today and making that contribution.

Mat, just real quick, before we end the whole issue of pandemic and pausing rights and all that, even if that existed, in this case, people might think, well, even if that nurses the sole breadwinner, he doesn’t have the right to put people in danger of the hospital because they bought the lie, they think that’s what’s happening. In reality, they’re not putting anybody in danger. If you could scientifically show that they were causing massive spread and causing people, that’d be a totally different animal. That is not what’s happening. But that’s people’s perception. Can you address that for a second as well? Because I’m assuming you all had to address that in the suit?

Mat:

Oh, yeah, we addressed that in the suit. A number of these people, for example, back in 2020, they got COVID, they missed a few days from work and they treated themselves, they got treatment, they were back to work. So they already had natural immunity, which is better than anything else. Obviously, God made your system to work properly and natural immunity is obviously the best protection against the same condition coming back again.

And so they already had natural immunity. They learned obviously through the process, like we all did about how to better take care of yourself, increase your immunity, and then address these issues with other kinds of medications that have been long since used, safe and effective, rather than these COVID shots. In fact, what we now know from the COVID shots, I mean, it’s undeniable at this point. Talk about science denying, it’s science denying right now to deny the data that’s coming out, that is conclusively one after another after another coming to the same resolution and conclusion that we said for months and months, and that is the shots are not safe, nor are they effective. Even Fauci now says, well, you know, the shots are not effective. He didn’t think they were going to be effective. Well, that’s not what he was saying originally, he was speaking out big lie. Now he admits that he didn’t think they would be effective and he now says they weren’t effective.

Rick:

Yeah. What do you do when they’re willing to just completely ignore all that data and ignore that science? You have to go to legal fights. I mean, it used to be that you could just rationally, sit down, look at the data, say, here’s the best policy for everybody, and there was a level of just logic and science that would be used to make these decisions at a government level. And this time it was all politicized, political science took over. And so without the legal remedies to now force them to do the right thing and look at that, all of these people would have been out of luck. So it’s why what you’re doing is so huge. Mat, real quick update, can you give us like a 30 second update on the military cases that you got because you got the Air Force, you got all these different cases going?

Mat:

Yes. As I was just, in fact, in court for 4 hours on the military case involving some United States Marines, one of them was about ready to be evicted on August the 5th with 48 hours notice. That’s it, 48 hours, the first Lieutenant of the United States Marine. We got a TRO, Temporary Restraining Order just the evening before his eviction that was scheduled for August the 5th. We’re now pressing forward and the Judge says that he is very close to finishing the class certification order that he is preparing, he and his law clerks. And we anticipate we’re going to get class certification and protection for the United States Marines.

Right now, there is class wide protection regarding the religious freedom rights of the United States Navy members, the Air Force, the Space Force. The fourth one coming online should be the United States Marines. We are also pressing for the Coast Guard and then to round that out, the United States Army that will cover all six branches of the military.

Rick:

Man, I wish we had more time, brother. I really encourage people to get on your email list. That’s how I stay up to date with what Mat is doing. There’s so many cases. There’s so much going on. You got to get on the email list to be able to… And frankly, I look forward to your email every day, Mat, because not only do you show eyes wide open here’s how bad it is out there, you always have some good news in there as well. And I’m just thankful for you. Lc.org is the website. Go make a contribution today, folks. Get on that email list. This is the front line. I mean, they are fighting for our liberty. God bless you, Mat Staver. I appreciate you coming on today.

Mat:

Thank you. Good to be with you.

Rick:

Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

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Rick:

We’re back on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Mat Staver for joining us once again this week, and what a great victory. David and Tim, this hopefully, as we’ve talked about ripple effects across the country or maybe even a tsunami here to basically say to employers, hey, you do not have the right to discriminate based on a religious exemption in this case. And most hospitals did this during COVID. So I would think they’re starting to go back and say, how do we make this right before we get sued?

Tim:

I think it’s also interesting, too, as Mat pointed out, that they didn’t even go anywhere with this case. As soon as the other attorneys began investigating this and realizing we don’t really have a case, this is what boggled my mind for so long. And I think now because even the CDC has come out and acknowledged that all of their previous requirements dealing with COVID essentially they’re acknowledging they were wrong by changing the standards; now to say it doesn’t matter who has what and what’s going where, just be normal, live your life. That is them by default acknowledging they were incorrect with their earlier guidance.

With that being said, when you saw some of the responses, or maybe over responses from so many organizations, how much military, but hospitals and these businesses and all these people have been fired, only now to just recently had the CDC come out and change their mind on everything. It made us wonder early on why there weren’t more people when they were going to court realizing, oh yeah, we don’t really have the grounds to do this. It’s either that Judges because they thought we’re still a pandemic, we’re not going to really consider the Constitution as they should have in their review, or it was people who were losing their jobs who didn’t want to fight as hard as maybe they should. I think there’s some underlying factors, it’ll be very interesting to see.

But this is a response I would have expected largely from the beginning, that once somebody begin examining the constitutional framework around what this case was, that the other attorneys would go, oh yeah, we don’t really have grounds to randomly fire all these people without giving them some kind of religious exemption option in what’s happening. And yet we saw this so often.

So first of all, it’s really encouraging. This could be like a Good News Friday. Good news, what is happening, that there are people like Mat Staver doing this. But it did make me wonder why there weren’t more people coming to the conclusion like these attorneys did when they settled before they even went to court, which also makes me wonder if they could have gotten more had they gone to court because they clearly realized they were wrong. So they’re going to pay money just to not go to court and cost them even more money. Obviously, they’re wrong. Why didn’t more people see this? Not sure. Either way, this is a great victory for Mat.

David:

And see, that’s where I think the real commentary is on what’s happened with this case; is if you take a really bad decision, like the Dred Scott decision in 1857, where the supreme court made the decision that no black man has any rights which a white man is bound to respect, you take that terrible philosophy, and that’s really what we’ve seen in recent years with religion. There’s no rights which a religious person has, which a nonreligious person is bound to respect. And so, most of these corporate attorneys that went through secular law schools probably did not even have an introduction to defending or protecting religious rights because that’s not important to secular people, that’s not important to their professors, that’s not important to anybody else.

And I’m sure these attorneys, early on for the hospital, they were approving and signing off on what the hospital was doing. And then when they get into court and they go back and actually look at the lawsuits and look at the court decisions and look at the constitution, they go, oh, my gosh, we don’t have a leg to stand on. We didn’t know this. And I think that Mat kind of commented on that as all these secular law firms are now looking at this to say, at a $10.3 million settlement, hey, we need to get involved in this, we need to look after these religious rights.

But I think we’ve gone through a period of time where we just don’t even think religious people have rights anymore. And I go back even a number of years when I did a late night TV program with John Stewart on the Daily Show, and when I commented him and said, look, John, there’s all these religious kids in school that are losing their rights, said no, no, religious people can’t lose their rights, they’re in the majority. And it was a wild thought to him that religious people would need legal protection in court.

And we’ve really come that far in a number of years where now it’s like, wait a minute, religious people don’t get protected. Oh, they do? Really? The Constitution says they do. I think that’s just a real commentary on what our education system has done in the last 20 years is that we don’t even cover basic constitutional stuff in law school to the point that attorneys, it’s a shock to them to find out that religious people actually have constitutional protection. And so I don’t know that’s what really strikes me in this case is that they settled so early and they settled right after the attorneys really started looking at a lawsuit and figured out they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

And you know that with a group as big as that was, with as many tens of thousands of employees, 240 locations, they’ve got the best legal attorneys out there, and those guys were completely oblivious to the fact that there are constitutional protections for religious beliefs and convictions.

Rick:

Well, I got to say, I’m certainly with what Tim said. I thought that this would happen a lot quicker than it did on so many of these issues. It’s a shame that it’s taken this long, but so glad that we’re getting these victories. And you nailed it, David, I mean, most people just don’t know how the Constitution works, they don’t know what their rights are. We know that if we don’t know our rights, we will not perceive when they’re violated, we won’t stand up and defend and assert them properly. John Jay warned of that. It’s time for us to get educated on these things.

That’s why, folks, you can be the catalyst for a restoration of those principles, constitutional values, biblical values in your community. You can be the catalyst. Take our materials and use them in your community. Become a Constitution coach. Start hosting biblical citizenship at your church. That’s how we turn this around. We’ve got to get back to civic literacy and biblical literacy. Thanks so much for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.