The Kansas Supreme Court has sided with a Leawood woman who says she lost a job offer after her potential employer questioned the sincerity of her religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccine.
The case hinged on whether a Kansas law that prohibits employers from questioning the religious convictions of employees who want to be exempted from vaccine requirements is constitutional and conflicted with a federal COVID-era vaccination mandate.
Justice Caleb Stegall, writing for the 4-2 majority, said that since the federal mandate allowed but did not require an employer to dig deeper when an employee asks for a religious exemption, it did not conflict with the Kansas law.
Furthermore, the state law had a valid purpose in protecting maximum religious liberty, Stegall wrote. The employer could have granted the exemption without asking further about its sincerity and would not have run afoul of either state or federal law, the opinion said.
The ruling overturns Johnson County District Judge David Hauber’s 2023 decision that the state law was in conflict with federal law and therefore unconstitutional.
The case originated in Leawood in 2022, at a time when the pandemic was still raging and vaccine requirements were relatively new.
Below is a copy of the opinion.
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The case centered on Katlin Keeran, who was offered a job at Powerback Rehabilitation, LLC, as an occupational therapy assistant in 2022, according to the case.
Keeran’s job offer was conditional upon her being vaccinated or her submitting an approved religious exemption.
Powerback had a policy at the time that complied with a since-lifted federal mandate that health care staff be vaccinated if the facility was to receive federal funds.
Religious exemptions were allowed under the rule, and Keeran filled out a form and answered follow-up questions from Powerback’s human resources department, according to the suit.
She said she was not familiar with the vaccine and that she opposed using vaccines that were developed using fetal cells. A friend wrote a letter of support for Keeran’s religious conviction, citing Psalm 139.
Powerback denied her exemption and withdrew the job offer. Keeran won her subsequent case with the state Department of Labor, but that was overturned by the district court.
Most justices unconvinced by employer’s case
Powerback lawyers argued that the company was in an untenable position because it would have to choose between violating either the federal mandate or Kansas’ law saying religious exemptions had to be accepted at face value.
But Stegall wrote that federal law defines a minimum protection against discrimination by employers.
“That floor is not, however, the final answer. States are free to raise the floor and provide additional protections against discrimination,” he wrote.
He also doubted the federal mandate’s purpose of providing a vaccinated health care workforce would be neutralized by “waves of the irreligious and/or insincere religious observers claiming a sincere religious belief to carte blanche avoid vaccination … Nowhere have these facts been remotely established and we decline to entertain such wild speculation.”
Although the federal mandate allowed employers to inquire into the sincerity of the beliefs in deciding on exemptions, that wasn’t enough to create a direct conflict between federal and state law. The language is in a preamble and therefore is not authoritative law, he wrote.
Two justices dissented
Two justices signed on to a dissenting opinion. Justice Melissa Taylor Standridge contended that the state law was in clear conflict with the federal mandate.
Employers have long been permitted to inquire into the religious sincerity of an employee’s belief when deciding on accommodations for them and whether those accommodations would be an undue hardship on the employer, she wrote.
By mandating an automatic exemption without allowing an inquiry, the Kansas law, “deprives employers of the federal right under Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act) to engage in a meaningful interactive process for purposes of determining whether accommodating an employee’s religious beliefs — even if sincerely held — would result in ‘undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.’”
The argument that the state law isn’t preempted because the federal mandate only permits rather than requires sincerity is “hard to take seriously,” Standridge wrote.
“That reasoning effectively reads the employer’s federally protected right out of existence. State law cannot nullify or forbid the exercise of a federally granted right, even if that right is discretionary rather than mandatory,” she wrote.
Justice Eric Rosen joined in that dissent.
