NEWS PROVIDED BY
Pacific Justice Institute
Jan. 16, 2025

SALEM, Ore., Jan. 16, 2025 /Standard Newswire/ -- Thanks to the Pacific Justice Institute, Oregon’s Court of Appeals has overturned a decision denying a Christian healthcare worker unemployment benefits and ordered Oregon’s Employment Division to pay up.

On Dec. 18, the Court of Appeals overturned the second decision of Oregon’s Employment Appeals Board (EAB) denying Alison K. Lavelle-Hayden unemployment benefits. Lavelle-Hayden is a Seventh-Day Adventist and a respiratory therapist whose former employer, Portland-based Legacy Health, fired her for declining to receive a COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons.

At her unemployment benefits hearing, Lavelle-Hayden testified as to her religious opposition to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine due to the vaccines’ connection to abortion. She also provided a letter she had submitted to Legacy in support of her request for a religious exception to Oregon’s vaccine mandate for health care workers – something both Title VII, Oregon law, and even the mandate itself allowed. Neither Legacy nor Oregon’s Employment Division provided any evidence to controvert Lavelle-Hayden’s assertions concerning the religious nature of her beliefs.

Despite Legacy failing to meet its burden of proof concerning misconduct, the administrative law judge (ALJ) at Lavelle-Hayden’s hearing still found misconduct on Lavelle-Hayden’s part due to her religiously based refusal to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The EAB twice upheld the ALJ’s ruling – the first time after admitting to the Court of Appeals that its prior decision was not supported by substantial evidence. The Court of Appeals remanded the case the first time so the EAB could correct its erroneous decision.

The EAB failed to do so, instead focusing on evidence in the record that the EAB believed undermined Lavelle-Hayden’s assertion that her beliefs were, in fact, religious. PJI’s Oregon-based staff attorney, Ray D. Hacke, thus petitioned the Court of Appeals a second time, arguing that the EAB had blatantly ignored a long line of Supreme Court precedents prohibiting the board from punishing Lavelle-Hayden for adhering to her sincerely held convictions.

The court agreed.

“What matters for purposes of the First Amendment is whether someone seeking unemployment benefits lost their job based on a sincerely held belief that is rooted in religion,” Hacke explained. “While Ms. Lavelle-Hayden did express some secular concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines, the law requires the Court of Appeals to look at the record as a whole. The court rightly found that the EAB chose to focus on Ms. Lavelle-Hayden’s secular concerns while completely ignoring uncontroverted evidence that her beliefs are, in fact, rooted in religion.

“Ms. Lavelle-Hayden even quoted Scripture supporting her position. If that’s not evidence that her beliefs are rooted in religion, it’s difficult to fathom what is.”

The Court of Appeals has ordered the EAB to pay Lavelle-Hayden unemployment benefits, ending a battle that has taken nearly three years.

“Why the EAB has consistently sought to punish Alison Lavelle-Hayden for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons is beyond me,” PJI President Brad Dacus said. “Thankfully, Oregon’s Court of Appeals right recognized that the hostility the EAB showed toward Ms. Lavelle-Hayden’s beliefs has no place in American law and took the board to task over it. PJI is glad to have played a part in getting her the unemployment benefits she should have gotten way back in 2022, and we hope the EAB has learned to stay in its constitutional lane moving forward.”

SOURCE Pacific Justice Institute

CONTACT: 916-857-6900, info@pji.org