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Pagan nurse who says it's not nice to fool Mother Nature sues Boston Medical Center for firing her after she refused to get Covid-19 shots
By adamg on Tue, 11/15/2022 - 9:59am
A Boston Medical Center staff nurse who believes Mother Nature doesn't want her getting shots or even taking medicines yesterday sued her former employer because it rejected her request for a religious exemption from Covid-19 shots and fired her last October.
In her suit, filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Amy Munroe says that even if she hadn't requested a religious exemption, the hospital should have let her continue working because contracted Covid-19 and so had antibodies, which means she wouldn't have proved any more of a risk to patients than nurses who don't share her belief that Mother Nature, along with a healthy lifestyle that includes extensive time outdoors and foregoing TV and social media, gave her all the immune powers to not need a "Covid genetic therapy treatment."
Munroe is the latest BMC nurse to sue the hospital on First Amendment religious grounds over the way they were fired after being denied exemptions from Covid-19 shots. All are represented by Peter Vickery, an Amherst attorney who is filing a series of individual suits, rather than a single class-action suit against the hospital.
As with all the other suits - as well as similar ones against Children's Hospital and the state - Munroe's complaint is filled with supposed examples of how the Covid-19 vaccines don't work to block transmission of the disease, in addition to specifying Munroe's specific religious qualms with them.
In her exemption request, filed with the complaint, Munroe acknowledges that in years past she got the flu vaccinations the hospital also required, but only reluctantly and after "a good cry." And besides, that vaccine is natural - it's made from a dead or weakened virus, not some frankenvaccine made up in a lab.
She says she was raised Catholic, but was driven away when she learned of the sex-abuse scandal and began to realize her beliefs were more in line with paganism, whose practitioners were "peaceful, Nature worshipers who believed in leaving others to do what they saw fit for themselves."
It is my belief that wild fires, global warming, earthquakes, and the Covid pandemic itself are signs she is angry with Her humans and wants to humble them, lest they forget that there can only be one center of a circle and that She is that center.
And viruses, including the coronavirus variants that cause Covid-19, are simply part of nature and we need to learn to live with them, she wrote.
Despite being a nurse, or maybe because of being one, I personally do not participate in Western medicine the same way that most people do. In accordance with my beliefs, I opt to rely on Mother Nature for natural remedies to heal my ailments, or to suffer through them until I am well. Mother Nature will get me through them, or she won't. When my time is up, and She comes for me, I will go without fear, knowing that I have completed The Circle of Life and will become part of the Earth again in a different form. ...
I cannot defy Mother Nature, nor my innate instincts. Taking a genetic therapy treatment that I am extremely fearful of, against my will and better judgement, as a perfectly healthy human being, to treat a naturally occurring virus, goes completely against beliefs that I have held most my life. Being forced to take the vaccine in order to keep the job that I love and was port on Earth to do, will result in severe and permanent emotional and psychological damage, mental anguish and intolerable inner torment. ... Please do not force me to be a traitor to myself and My God.
Complete complaint (344k PDF).
Complete exemption request (5.3M PDF).
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Comments
You have got to be kidding me...
Are there no satanic nurses who want to sue?
Paganism is no more
Paganism is no more ridiculous than Christianity. All religions are made up nonsense.
As a religious person
Yes, you are exactly correct. All religions were created by humans, and are based mostly on things that can't be proven or disproven. That's why it's called faith.
You mean blind Faith
An unquestioning belief in something, even when it's unreasonable or wrong.
Heresy
You're offending my Flying Spaghetti Monster sensibilities. I will now more tightly afix this collander on my head to block your negative vibes.
Not unless …
…. it involves an invocation vaccination.
She believes that medicine is wrong but still works as a nurse?
How does that line up if this is "the job that I love and was port on Earth to do"?
Honestly, if I was her supervisor, I'd be reviewing every case she's touched to make sure that the patients actually got the medication and treatment they were supposed to.
Not Unusual
This is not unusual. I knew a strict vegan who worked as a deli meat slicer in Stop & Shop.
not even apples and oranges
Nursing requires years of schooling and certifications, pretty sure you can work a meat slicer with 10 minutes of training and a promise to not slice off a finger.
To be committed to medicine as a career while not believing in medicine as a science is a major red flag. I would not feel comfortable under the care of someone with similar beliefs.
tongue-in-cheek
I belive the deli slicer comment was something of a tongue-in-cheek remark. :-)
Eh, more like kumquats and oranges
An LPN program is less than a year of schooling. An RN can be obtained with an associate's. Sure, a lot of nurses have more schooling, but a lot don't.
For whatever reason, a LOT of people, including many fellow professionals, tend to think of nurses as requiring a graduate degree just like PT/OT/SLP/LMHC/etc. Don't get me wrong, most nurses are great and work their asses off, but there are also a lot who give opinions and advice way out of their scope, and there are fellow professionals who defer to this when they really shouldn't.
So yeah, it's more training than a meat slicer, but unless they're an advanced practice nurse, they usually have a year or two of school.
I thought pagans only cried...
As they were burned at the stake?
"An' it harm none, do what ye will"
I'm OK with people not getting vaccinated due to these sorts of beliefs. But choose a different profession, then—if only to respect the wishes of those who do want protection.
No way
There's no way I would trust this person to be my nurse.
Nor I
But how could we tell? Good for the Medical Center saving us from that!
Who’s Peter Vickery? He’s
Who’s Peter Vickery? He’s filed at least 3 of these lawsuits that Adam’s features on this blog. How is a lawyer all the way out in Amherst getting these former BMC employees as clients?
Listing for him
https://www.rnla.org/6780
All the way out in Amherst?
Amherst?? That's almost Los Angeles....
She's not a good nurse
but man would she make a great President of the United States. Republicans of Boston need to get on this before her blood cools. Endorse endorse endorse!
The Bride of VA Shiva perhaps?
Since Fran Drescher dumped him...
I hope she wins.
I wlll establish my own religion. Establish the dogma I want. Then claim I am exempt from any laws or regulations that conflict with that dogma.
Oooh, and I know the Judaic-Christian Bible well enough that I can easily justify my religion as being based on the same (Mormons pulled that off and set a nice legal precedent). The things that the Judaic-Christian sacred texts will let me get a way with! Fun times!
Everything is mine
will be the chief doctrine of my religion. Your property is theft of my property. Also, I am free to do whatever I want, and you too are free to do whatever I want.
The Church
The Church of SamWack Freedom!
Interesting some responses are clearly religiously bigoted
Sometimes smarmy remarks and jokes can point to bias, conscious or unconscious.
Religions do not have carte blanche to not following the law just on religious grounds. In this state and many others one need only hold certain religious beliefs and practices as important, and do not need to be a member of a formal church or society. But there are limits.
For example Native Americans once sued to have access to peyote for purpose of vision but that was denied due to the health risks.
We find humor here in a person with nature and personification of nature as Deity, but those with mainstream practices should take note.
Let's remember that it was not that long ago that staunch Christians refused to issue same-gender marriage licenses in several states based on their personal beliefs.
Many here said get another job but no one in those states got fired. Indeed there remain some counties in a few select states that just stopped issuing all marriage licenses to avoid being told to issue a same gender one. Not all states have removed the state constitutional changes that stopped gay marriage either. They are only accommodating a slim finding of SCOTUS.
And let us not forget the Christian right-wing flag that won a case against Boston, and a lot of money to boot.
The issue here is not one's personal beliefs which some have ridiculed as the initial article seems to focus on, but whether the hospital overstepped their bounds with respect to the individuals highly held beliefs regardless of how some may find it odd.
Were religious rights stepped on when others were accommodated? Could the person have been temporarily assigned to other non-patient duties? The case, if it proceeds, will be looking at a lot of things.
Stepping on the beliefs of non-mainstream practices, no matter how unusual, is one of the things that has gotten this nation in trouble too often.
We did it to Original Nations where ever we went, here and abroad. We even did it to the LDS church (Mormon). Some years back a southern state wanted to refuse tax exempt status to the Unitarian Church (based in Boston) since, after all, they are not a real religion... are they? The church won that one.
As to choosing another profession, people manufacture guns but may also be against gun violence or their proliferation. Some may be environmentalists that are against auto emissions but still work on a Ford assembly line. The suggestion to get another job rings of a sense of entitlement. Lots of that in Boston of late.
Generalization hurts us all. Let's hear what the case entails and how the law is applied.
FWIW, Pagans also have religious holidays and have to be accommodated equally in the work place. They do not have to be a member of a formal pagan church. Requiring that breeches separation of church and state and employers need to be aware and careful.
But nursing isn't just a job
Nursing isn't like many other jobs. You don't accidentally wind up being a nurse, even though it runs counter to your belief system, because it was the only job you can get. It requires specialized, lengthy, expensive education and training. Why on earth does someone who doesn't believe in science or modern medicine become a nurse? It's baffling. And they should have a different job.
When you say:
"The suggestion to get another job rings of a sense of entitlement,"
That makes sense to me in some situations, but not this one.
Yeah, no
Are you thinking of Kim Davis? If so, you're perhaps kinda technically right, because she was elected to her position, not hired, and therefore technically could not be fired.
She did go to jail, though. And she lost her reelection campaign.
I suspect
that her claim that she foregoes all social media is not entirely accurate.
Why does this site obsess
Why does this site obsess over fired nurses? Is it a fetish or do you just hate woman?
men can be nurses too
And it has been so nearly forever
Speaking for Myself
I don't care for anti-vaxxers who work in public positions suing for the right to infect and potentially kill other people because they're too selfish to take sensible precautions.
I wouldn't call it an obsession, I'd call it schadenfreude.
Maybe if they filed just one big suit ..
Instead of dribbling them out one or two at a time, it wouldn't seem like I'm obsessed, but they keep filing and I keep writing about them.
But in any case, welcome to Universal Hub, friend. You must be new here or you'd realize I've been writing up Covid-19 lawsuits since the beginning, not just out of some weird recent fixation on nurses.
Here's my very first (actually just a link to somebody else's report) way back on April 8, 2020. And here is every single Covid-19 lawsuit story I've written, all 96 of them.
Scroll down, past the most recent stories about nurses. You might as well ask me why I'm obsessed about college students suing over online classes, or restaurants suing their insurance companies, or mask haters suing because they couldn't take their kids to the zoo or, well, you name it.
Lawsuits are just my jam.
As someone with a condition
that can periodically put me in the hospital where I'm under direct care of nurses 24/7, I'm glad Adam covers these stories.
If you wanna build a church around the holy and glorious mystery of Miracle Whip then have at it.
As long as your whacked out belief system doesn't cause you to inject me with mayo instead of medication.
We need to monitor and keep these nuts out of Healthcare completely.
Oh God....oh Jesus Christ....
when your nurse shows you to your hospital room....
This nurse should be careful.
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Especially if that nurse is Mother Nature herself...
Dena Dietrich was the actress who portrayed Mother Nature in the Chiffon ads.
Does Paganism have religious or spiritual leaders?
Honestly, I know nothing about the practice of Paganism but the American Bar Association recommends:
10: To support the claim for a religious exemption, a religious or spiritual leader should certify the religious or spiritual basis of the claim and that the claimant is a member of that faith group. The City of Chicago, for example, requires this affirmation in the form it uses to request a religious exemption from a COVID-19 vaccination for employment with the city: “I have met with and provided religious or spiritual counsel to the . . . employee regarding their sincerely[-]held religious beliefs or practices. I affirm that this employee is a member of our religious organization. I further affirm that these beliefs regarding any immunization or immunizing agent are in line with the tenets of our religious or spiritual faith, teachings, [and] practices.”
Here's a link to the full list:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazi...).
Just read the exemption request: Mother Nature doesn't certify or affirm who or who is not a Pagan. It would be like asking Jesus to certify or affirm who is a Christian.