Religion Clause: 6th Circuit Refuses To Stay Class-Wide Injunction ...

In Doster v. Kendall, (6th Cir., Sept. 9, 2022), the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant an emergency stay of a class-wide injunction that was issued by an Ohio federal district court in a suit by Air Force and Space Force members who object on religious grounds to receiving the COVID vaccine. The district court enjoined the military from taking enforcement measures, while litigation is pending, against service members who have submitted confirmed requests for a religious accommodation from the military's vaccine mandate. The 6th Circuit said in part:

[T]he Department challenges only the merits of the district court’s decision to certify the class—the Department’s position being that, even if the named plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their individual claims, the court’s certification of the class was an abuse of discretion, and thus so too was the court’s issuance of a class-wide preliminary injunction....

The Department ... argues that RFRA claims categorically cannot be certified for class treatment. Here, for example, it says that the plaintiffs’ RFRA claim requires the court to determine separately for each service member whether the vaccination mandate is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. We agree that most RFRA claims require that kind of individualized analysis; and we have no quarrel with the Department’s contention that such an analysis could not be conducted class-wide here. But the Department’s argument misconceives the nature of the RFRA claim that the district court certified. The court’s order emphasized on almost every page that the RFRA claim it certified was one based on a class-wide “clear policy of discrimination against religious accommodation requests.” ... That claim ... does not turn on an analysis of the class members’ individual circumstances and likely can be adjudicated class-wide.