Southwest Airlines has been held in contempt of court by a federal judge for flouting his instructions over how to address the intersection between the freedom of speech and the religious practices of its employees. The case centers on a flight attendant who was fired for expressing anti-abortion sentiment in what was deemed by Southwest to be in an impermissibly aggressive and incendiary way but a jury found was a valid expression of her constitutional rights.
Judge Holds Southwest Airlines In Contempt, Orders Airline To Issue Verbatim Statement To Employees Over Abortion And Free Speech Rights
I’ve detailed Charlene Carter’s lawsuit against Southwest Airlines and the eventual jury verdict in her favor here. She not only won a handsome settlement of $5.1 million (reduced to $800,000 by the judge), but also won her job back. Southwest has appealed the ruling.
> Read More: Southwest Airlines Flight Attendant Wins Lawsuit Over Abortion Advocacy
But beyond that, Southwest was ordered to make clear by U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr that it “may not discriminate against Southwest flight attendants for their religious practices and beliefs.” Instead, Southwest told employees that it “does not discriminate” on religious grounds while also reminding them to refer to the existing policy for questions. This was the same policy that was used to fire Carter after she attacked union leaders as “despicable” after they attended the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC.
When word reached Judge Starr, a Trump appointee, via a motion from Carter, of how Southwest conveyed his instructions to employees, he ruled the Dallas-based airline was in contempt of court and ordered it to pay further legal fees to Carter (he did not levy an additional fine against Southwest). Starr also ordered Southwest to send the following email (verbatim) to employees:
The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas ordered Southwest to issue the following statement to you: On December 20, 2022, Southwest’s Legal Department issued an e-mail to all flight attendants entitled “Recent Court Decision” regarding a federal court judgment against Southwest and Transport Workers Union, Local 556. That e-mail said, “[t]he court . . . ordered us to inform you that Southwest does not discriminate against our Employees for their religious practices and beliefs.” The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas subsequently found that the statement’s use of “does not discriminate” was incorrect. Accordingly, the Court has ordered Southwest’s Legal Department to issue the following amended statement:
Under Title VII, Southwest may not discriminate against Southwest flight attendants for their religious practices and beliefs, including—but not limited to—those expressed on social media and those concerning abortion.
You can review the judicial order here.
CONCLUSION
Southwest Airlines has been held in contempt of court for what a judge claims was a deliberately deceptive message to employees concerning free speech, specifically as it regards abortion or other matters of religious conscience.
Even as Southwest appeals the decision in Carter’s favor, Judge Starr has ordered the Texas airline to immediately clarify its policy regarding free speech and religious expression.
the shocking thing here is that the judge ordered the southwest team to fly out an instructor from the judge’s favorite right wing non profit and take a seminar from them as part of the punishment. totally nuts. this case has been a mess since the get go.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/08/politics/southwest-airlines-sanctions-alliance-defending-freedom/index.html
And then you’re linking to a joke of a news site.
As long as you people insist on teaching children in public school how to masturbate their teachers and random drag queens, you’ll have to live with a little pushback.
Otherwise, stop being a Marxist and grow up.
Cam seems to be the perfect example of what happens when you’ve bene indoctrinated by the far left.
You’ve lost all concept of what is real and reality.
The purpose of Southwest Airlines is to fly customers from point A to Point B in a safe and timely manner. The purpose of the employees is to do their best to make it happen. The purpose of the union is to represent their employees in matters that relate to their employment.
Staying within the points above, an employee should have the right to free speech as long as it is not on company time, using company monies, on company property, or wearing any clothing or identifying items that could imply that she is representing her employer. Likewise, the union president should have the right to voice their views, but not while on union time, not while spending union funds, while on union property, or wearing any clothing or identifying items that could imply that she is representing her union.
The union president has every right to be at that rally, but not as the union president and paid for using union funds that are collected from employees salaries, and intended to defend those dues paying employees in matters against the company.
The employee, according to the article in the “Read More” link above, sent the messages on Facebook through private messaging . I did not read anywhere that company email was used, maybe I missed it? A member of a union has every right to voice concerns when a union that is funded by dues collected from employees, and the purpose of the funds is for training and travel related to defending employees and representing employees in negotiations, is used for ANY OTHER PURPOSE than defending dues paying employees.
Good. This is nice to see. Christians, Whites, and Conservatives are routinely persecuted by large companies and corporations for their religious beliefs and their race so I appreciate conservative judges, bureaucrats, and politicians who actually fight back. This should be extended to pushing against DEI and diversity training because diversity just means less White people and less Christians. If an employee is allowed to publicly support BLM and black nationalism without being fired, an employee must be allowed to publicly support WLM and White Nationalism as a matter of equal treatment and equity. If you can wear a rainbow pin at work, one must be allowed to wear a straight pride pin at work as well and any company like airlines that manufactured lgbt pride pins must also manufacture Straight Pride pins as a matter of equity.
I personally wish Christians dropped their focus on abortion as freedom means controlling your own body and what grows in it. Outside of abortion for serious birth defects, only bad people abort as the practice is unconscionable. Why would we want to stop bad people from removing their genes from the gene pool? Every abortion means less anti Christians and anti Conservatives being born. We only guarantee more persecutions for Christians and Conservatives by opposing abortion rights. Why should we want to save our future tormentors and slave masters.
“Christians, Whites, and Conservatives are routinely persecuted by large companies and corporations for their religious beliefs and their race so”
Looool Um, no.
They literally are. Best Buy offering McKinsey-run management training only for non-whites is horrific.
Truth time, snowflakes: white people built America. The black people in the world with the highest standard of living live in … America.
You’re welcome. Now stop your whining.
The only whining here is you, troll.
This is literally all they have. Name-calling.
Well, two can play that game, Aaron. Groomer-Aaron.
Yes, I am a groomer. I believe all people should take their dogs any time between one and two months to get their dogs groomed by a professional groomer.
You are still a troll.
Friendly reminder a majority of Pedophiles belong to the lgbt community.
Not true at all.
Friendly reminder that 100% of people named “Chad” are tiny-handed incels who still live in their parents’ basement
I want to say it’s unprecedented in human history for a culture to celebrate its own destruction but it has happened before, sort of: The Roman Empire. Early Christians engaged in “suicidal martyrdom”. They would purposely pick violent fights to get killed and go to heaven until suicide was made into a mortal sin to stop the practice. There was the cult of Thecla that celebrated celibacy of women and sex and procreation as sinful. And in more modern times, the Shaker cult that tried to replace sex with shaking convulsions and unsurprisingly died out (their legacy lives on with their fantastic furniture they constructed.)
The irony is that the urge of recent immigrants to assimilate to such a culture isn’t like when the “empire”, whether the USA, Roman, or British was at its peak. What immigrant wants to identify as “American” at least as bourgeois leftists and conservatives like to think of themselves? One good thing about this is that my father was pressured to abandon his Polish language heritage to “assimilate” into American “culture”, but now, I find myself having more in common with recent immigrants of ANY country than “Americans”. When I generally go to a leftist BBQ, I find they are largely monolithic whether all African American, Hispanic, white liberal, etc. but my own are comprised of a mix of ESL speaking Slavs, Asians, African Americans and Hispanics (including Spaniards and Latinos). “MAGA” doesn’t really apply anymore in that the country is split into two sections of “Americans” that are as distinctly different as, say, France and Germany but even within those camps, they are further divided or “diverse.”
The current USA reminds me of the Balkans in 1985.
Your comments sections in many articles makes your blog essentially unreadable for an airline enthusiast. I’m sorry you have to make the decision to allow or disallow the kind of discussion that takes place here.
You don’t have to read the comments in order to read the blog posts…
100% agree with this. So many vile unmoderated comments in what should be an aviation blog.
I’m in favor of abortion rights as well as free speech. In general I support the judge’s decision.