We're fighting for your right to refuse.

And that means always, and everywhere.

Last week, we sent a letter to the Trump administration’s newly-formed Religious Liberty Commission (which held its first hearing yesterday), to advocate for the restoration of religious exemptions to mandatory school vaccinations in states where they’ve been abolished, including California, New York, Connecticut, and Maine. However, we also advocated against using Executive Branch authority to do this. As I explained in a recent Substack post, this could - and likely would - have very dangerous implications for the future of our nation. In a nutshell, this kind of Executive action could deal a significant blow (a death blow, perhaps) to individual liberties in the realm of medical mandates and beyond - in favor of ceding this authority to the President.

I encourage you to read the full text of our letter here. We were honored to be joined in this effort by veritable powerhouses of Constitutional and civil rights litigation: Liberty Counsel, Pacific Justice Institute, and Freedom Counsel. We also hosted a special event last night to break this all down, titled, “Will President Trump Force States to Restore Religious Exemptions?” You can watch the replay for free here.

But in the midst of our advocacy for individual religious liberty, and our resistance to federal overreach, something else has emerged. Without naming names, suffice it to say that various health freedom leaders across the country have fiercely criticized our efforts (and those who agree with us), in some cases even suggesting that we are only pushing back to serve our own interests, or because we are fortunate to live in “free states.” Not only is this grossly inaccurate, it’s just plain laughable.

Just to be clear, I didn’t live in a “free state” until three years ago. I split the first 44 years of my life between Massachusetts and Connecticut. And neither did our Co-Founder, Dawn Jolly, who originally hails from New York, and fought beside me in Connecticut when she also moved there. Though both of us have since moved on to the admittedly greener pastures of Idaho, we certainly haven’t forgotten what it’s like to live under tyranny. And we still have people in those states for whom we care deeply, and love. In case nobody has been paying attention, we’ve filed more lawsuits in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts collectively than any other region of the country over the last five years. So I’m not sure where the notion came from that we don’t care about people in those states anymore because we are “safe.”

Simply put, the actual reason we are fighting so hard against Executive Action is that we aren’t willing to sacrifice enduring religious liberty in all 50 states to provide temporary security in just four. You remember the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, don’t you?

But all of that aside, there are people who genuinely disagree with our legal strategy to win back exemptions, and that’s fine. We don’t demand that everyone agree with us on every point. But please allow me to explain our position and our strategy in just a little more detail.

Whenever we file a new lawsuit on behalf of a child who has been denied an education for asserting a religious objection to required school vaccinations, we always get at least a few naysayers, who tell us we're going about it all wrong. We shouldn't need religious exemptions in the first place, they say, because vaccine mandates are unconstitutional to begin with. They tell us that we are voluntarily submitting to medical tyranny by seeking to protect and defend religious exemptions.

We get it. And we agree that no government, at any level, should be compelling people to inject or ingest something into their bodies. We said as much in our recent letter to President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission, linked above. But we also operate in reality, and the reality is that the state of the law has developed such that the state's authority to mandate vaccinations for public health reasons has been deemed a valid and Constitutional exercise of the state's "police power." That was of course established by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, a decision that has, unfortunately, stood the test of time. The Supreme Court has never indicated that they are willing to abandon that decision, and it has been reaffirmed and applied in various contexts and by various courts throughout the last 120 years, perhaps most notoriously by the Supreme Court itself in Buck v. Bell, the 1927 decision that found the state possessed the power to forcibly sterilize women because, in its words, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." And as horrific as that decision is, neither Buck nor Jacobson has ever been overturned, and the current court has not so much as hinted that it is willing to do so, either.

So where does that leave us? To simply declare that the mandates are unconstitutional and refuse to follow them? And how, precisely, are we do to that? The schools will not let our children through the front doors in California, New York, Connecticut, Maine, and West Virginia. No one is listening to our personal declarations of what is and isn't constitutional. For good or for ill, we the people have ceded that authority to the Supreme Court. Our elected leaders in every municipal, state, and federal office in the nation have all agreed in unison that the Supreme Court has the final word. So, given that reality, what legal means do we have of refusing a vaccine mandate?

We have always held firm in our belief that the right to freely exercise our religious convictions is unquestionably protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (not to mention state constitutions as well). This is an arena that the Supreme Court has seen fit to wade into, and in recent years has repeatedly affirmed our individual right to exercise our faith free from government oppression. They ruled that the State of Colorado violated the First Amendment by showing blatant hostility to a baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. They ruled that a high school football coach could not be disciplined for praying on the field. They ruled that the State of Maine could not provide school choice vouchers to parents for their children to attend private secular, but not religious, schools. And they ruled that the City of Boston could not allow secular groups to hold flag-raising ceremonies at City Hall, while denying this same privilege to a Christian group. These are but a few recent examples.

This is why We The Patriots USA has developed a well-reasoned, strategic litigation strategy to win back our right to refuse vaccination mandates on the basis of our sincerely-held religious beliefs. Make no mistake: this right was STOLEN from us, and it was absolutely illegal. That's why we are fighting in states from coast to coast to reclaim it. But there's no way we are doing this without your help.

If you agree with our strategy, and you'd like to support our ongoing lawsuits in California and Connecticut, as well as planned lawsuits elsewhere to win back the right to refuse, please consider a tax-deductible gift to our Mid-Year Giving Campaign today. We've set a goal of $500,000 to raise by July 4, 2025, the five-year anniversary of our founding. That money would go a long way toward getting the Supreme Court decision we so desperately need - and deserve. No child in this country should ever be told he can't attend school because he's the "wrong religion." With your help, we'll see to it that this never happens again.