This is the first in a three-part series on the movement for religious freedom in the U.S. legal system today. Stay tuned for the next two installments.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, represents Americans in religious freedom cases who have been turned away from hospitals because they refuse to take a vaccine for COVID-19.
“It’s disgraceful to put anyone on medical death row simply because they’re not willing to take a very controversial experimental vaccine, which is now proven to be very counterproductive,” Dacus tells “The Daily Signal” podcast in an interview conducted in February at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention here.
Some of the Pacific Justice Institute’s clients need organ transplants, he says, but “a minority of hospitals” are denying them.
“Most say no problem, you don’t have to be vaxxed, but these few out there are saying yes, you have to, and it just so happens we discovered they have contracts with Big Pharma,” Dacus says.
The lawyer argues that “more than 99% of those in the hospital with COVID-19, with serious conditions, are people who were vaxxed. The non-vaxxed are not in the hospitals, and yet [a minority of hospitals] continue to push it.”
“We’re defending people based on their sincerely held religious beliefs and convictions, and—needless to say—we’re making great progress and saving thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs for brothers and sisters in Christ across the nation,” Dacus says. “There has been a more than a 13,000% increase in the number of 12- to 19-year-olds who have myocarditis, a very serious heart inflammation disease.”
Dacus cites a 2022 study from the British Medical Journal finding “net harm” caused by booster shots for young adults.
“Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5-4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization),” the study’s authors wrote.
Dacus explains on the podcast that Christians, among others, “don’t have to have doctrine” or “be a part of a certain denomination” to decline to take a COVID-19 vaccine, they only “have to have a sincerely held religious belief or conviction” against it to apply for an exemption to vaccine mandates. Some Christians note that aborted embryos were used in developing the vaccines, and that is a valid conviction, he says.
Dacus also speaks about protecting the religious freedom of Christians who refuse to support gender ideology.
One of his Christian clients in Washington state owns a Korean women’s spa, the lawyer says, and traditionally women in Korean spas don’t wear clothes. One day, he recounts, “a man comes in and he says, ‘Hey, I want to go to the women’s spa.’ They say, ‘No, this is for mothers and there are mothers and their teenage daughters in there. Absolutely not.’”
“These women will be visually violated, to say the least, and he would be lewdly exposing himself to all these women and these little young teenage girls,” Dacus explains. This would be “criminal in any other context,” he says, but the man “leaves and he reports it to the Washington State Human Rights Commission.”
The state commission sued the Korean spa to try to force it to allow naked men who claim to identify as women.
Lower courts ruled against the spa, but the Pacific Justice Institute has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Dacus also pushes back against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left smear factory that has branded his law firm an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” and put it on a map alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Southern Poverty Law Center is like a snake,” the religious freedom lawyer says. “They’re the most hate-filled, hate-indoctrinating organization in the country. They breed division, they breed hate, they breed misunderstanding. Their goal is to silence; to vilify, silence, and destroy.”
Listen to the full interview below.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.