EEOC says 'robust' religious liberty enforcement actions taken, including on vaccine mandates

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency tasked with enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring and employment, said Aug. 18 it has taken "robust" actions to prevent religious discrimination in the workplace within the first six months of the second Trump administration.

In a news release, the EEOC touted what it called "significant victories for Americans of all faiths and reflect the agency's strong, ongoing commitment to upholding religious liberty protections for workers." It cited settlements with workers at industries including hospitality, construction, and medical care who alleged religious discrimination by their employers and efforts to combat antisemitism at universities.

The statement also said it took particular aim at COVID-19 "vaccine mandates."

"Title VII recognizes the reality that religious freedom is a fundamental right that transcends workplace policies," EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement. "During the previous administration, workers' religious protections too often took a backseat to woke policies. Under my leadership, the EEOC is restoring evenhanded enforcement of Title VII -- ensuring that workers are not forced to choose between their paycheck and their faith."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, alongside other Catholic groups, in 2024 filed suit against the EEOC over its regulations for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which granted workers protections for time off and other job accommodations for pregnancy-related medical conditions such as miscarriage, stillbirth and lactation -- but also for abortion, the latter of which was opposed by many of the bill's supporters.

The conference was among the bill's supporters who argued that it was not intended to include abortion as passed by Congress. On April 15, a federal judge blocked the regulations from impacting the plaintiffs while the still-ongoing case proceeds.

While some have raised objections to employer-based requirements to receive COVID-19 vaccinations, the Catholic Church has been clear that Catholics may receive those vaccines while stressing such decisions should be voluntary.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, shortly before vaccines became available to the American public, the Holy See's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholic bishops, and theologians all released statements that the COVID-19 vaccines were morally permissible for Catholics to receive.

Those statements varied only slightly, as the U.S. bishops encouraged Catholics, where they had such a choice, to seek some brands of vaccines over others due to the varying degrees of remote connection to cell lines derived originally from several unborn children aborted in the mid-20th century.

Currently used cell lines are not the same as fetal tissue, as they were developed in a laboratory over the course of decades. Almost all cells die after they have divided a certain number of times, a phenomenon scientists call the Hayflick limit.

The 2020 statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now a dicastery, said while Catholics can morally undergo vaccination for COVID-19, such a decision should be voluntary, not compulsory.

The statement said that while any connection to abortion was remote, "the licit use of such vaccines does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute, and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated."

That statement added, "from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed.

It is not yet clear if updated COVID-19 vaccines for 2025 will be made available to the general public in the U.S. The current Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of many vaccines, particularly mRNA vaccines, has taken steps to scale back their use and has sparred with the American Academy of Pediatrics over their vaccination guidance.