Ex-WSU football coach Nick Rolovich, who is appealing his firing through university channels, says the human resources department’s approval of his request for a religious exemption was arbitrarily overturned by the athletic director.
Seattle’s KING 5 News reported (here), “It is unclear if Rolovich’s exemption was denied or approved.” But his attorneys contend the HR department approved his request, using a “blind” process in which reviewers don’t know who the employee is, but then athletic director Patrick Chun intruded on that process by questioning the “sincerity” of Rolovich’s religious beliefs.
WSU hasn’t said whether Rolovich’s religious exemption request was approved or denied. ABC News reported (here) that an athletic department memo “disclosed he attempted to seek a medical exemption but was unable to secure the necessary documentation,” and only then did he request a religious exemption. His attorneys called that “categorically false,” and said he “never considered applying for a medical exemption.”
The school did use a “blind” process to review employee requests for exemptions from the governor’s vaccination mandate applicable to state and higher education employees, but an exempted employee’s department still had to determine whether the person could be accommodated.
ABC News says documents reviewed by ESPN show that WSU’s Environmental Safety and Health department worked up a list of Covid-19 “safety procedures” specific to Rolovich’s job duties. The school has taken the position that even if granted an exemption, Rolovich couldn’t be accommodated due to the nature of his duties as head football coach.
In a previous post (here), I speculated that Rolovich’s “objection to the vaccine may flow from the fact that fetal stem cells were used in testing the vaccines.” That was a good guess. The ABC News story alludes to “his religious opposition to medical research based on aborted fetal issue.”
But there’s more, lots more. Rolovich appears to be all-in on a whole gamut of rightwing conspiracy theories relating to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Citing the athletic department memo, ABC News indicated he’s skeptical “about the COVID-19 virus” and whether there’s a “public health emergency,” is “critical” of the government’s role in managing the pandemic, objected that the vaccine wasn’t fully FDA-approved yet, and according to the memo “communicated a multitude of baseless theories with respect to vaccination.”
That won’t sell in federal court, where he intends to seek $10 million of compensation if WSU doesn’t reinstate him. Most federal judges have sided with public health authorities and upheld mandates, and you need more than conspiracy theories to prove a court case. If WSU’s process was a sham, his complaints about short-circuiting the approval process might get a sympathetic hearing, but he’s still going to come across as an anti-vaxxer flake.
Which he apparently is. And what’s with that chain around his neck?
A sympathetic judge or jury just has to find that he could in fact do his job as head coach and the school should have accommodated his request. Since there is an actual written contract involved he may well be an anti vaxxer flake who in the end with his attorney laughs all the way to the bank. [Edited comment.]
A court will not second-guess the university’s accommodation decision. A judge will, however, consider whether the process itself was fair. The case well might boil down to contract issues. But that would raise this question: Can a state employer bargain away in contract negotiations its power to impose health regulations for a future public health emergency no one could foresee?