One of the most well-settled principles of US national security law is that courts give tremendous deference to the military’s decisions regarding how to maintain discipline among its own personnel. “The essence of military service,” the Court held in Goldman v. Weinberger(1986), “is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service.” Servicemembers voluntarily give up some of their constitutional rights when they choose to join the armed services.
And yet, on Monday, a notoriously partisan federal judge in Texas thumbed his nose at decades of law and Supreme Court precedents, holding that members of the military may refuse an order to take the Covid-19 vaccination if they object to it on religious grounds. In a brief order in US Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden, US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor claims that a policy requiring nearly all servicemembers to be vaccinated against Covid-19 violates both the First Amendment and a federal religious liberty statute.
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