The court denied both panel rehearing and rehearing en banc in Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center, No. 23-3710, leaving in place a decision that affirmed dismissal of data privacy executive Sherry Detwiler's claim against her former employer.
Detwiler had sought religious exemptions from both the vaccination and testing requirements at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. She received a religious exemption from the hospital's COVID-19 vaccination requirement but was terminated when the hospital required weekly COVID-19 testing — using nasal swabs treated with ethylene oxide — as a condition of that exemption.
The original panel held that Detwiler failed to adequately plead a bona fide religious belief conflicting with her employer's policies. The panel required plaintiffs to show "a clear nexus between their religious convictions and their choice not to comply with those measures that does not involve secular knowledge" and held that "invocation of prayer, without more" was insufficient to establish religious significance.
Judge Kathryn Kimball Forrest, joined by six other judges, dissented. She wrote that the panel's standard "necessarily requires judging religious belief, and it is a significant misstep that risks reducing the freedom of belief to the freedom of accepted belief, which is not freedom at all."
Judge Tung, joined by seven other judges, filed a separate dissent arguing that the panel majority "legally erred by recharacterizing the plaintiff's clearly religious objection to a company policy as purely secular merely because the objection turned in part on a secular consideration."
With the denial of rehearing, the panel's affirmance of dismissal stands.