Anti-vax baseball coach from Miami files religious discrimination complaint against MLB team
Two minor league baseball coaches with the Washington Nationals — one of them from Florida — have filed religious discrimination complaints after they say they were fired for refusing to get COVID-19 vaccines.
Larry Pardo, of Miami, and Brad Holman, of Wichita, Kansas, filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, alleging the baseball franchise violated “their rights to free expression and observation of their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The EEOC complaints were filed Friday by their Miami attorney, Alexander Fox. The complaints are expected to lay the groundwork for a federal lawsuit.
The coaches are but two of a growing number of Americans who are seeking to obtain religious exemptions from getting the vaccines, as more governments and companies have begun to mandate inoculations.
The Nationals last week terminated the contracts of Holman, 53, who was a minor-league pitching coordinator, and Pardo, 55, who coached in the Florida Complex League, a rookielevel league affiliated with major-league clubs. Both men joined the Nationals in 2018.
Pardo is a Columbus High graduate who played in the minor leagues in the mid-1980s and early
1990s. He’s worked coaching pitchers with a variety of franchises and lowerlevel
leagues.
The Nationals were one of the first Major League Baseball teams to require non-playing employees receive a COVID-19 vaccination, or a valid exemption. Former Nationals Vice President Bob Boone resigned earlier this month over the mandate.
In a press release, Pardo and Holman said the Nationals “pretended to offer” them a chance to explain how their religious beliefs exempted them from getting the vaccine. Less than 36 hours later, the team denied them the exemption, they said.
“While we are not going to comment on specific exemptions, we took every request very seriously and applied a rigorous and interactive process to each request as is prescribed by applicable law,” a Nationals spokesperson said in a statement.
Pardo is Catholic, Holman Evangelical Christian. They claim that getting the vaccine goes against their religious beliefs because they are “made from and/ or tested on aborted fetal cells.” They also said they’d been getting regular COVID-19 tests.
“Larry and Brad made this decision after many hours of prayer,” Fox wrote in the press release. “They could not and will not choose to take the vaccines even if it costs them their jobs, which it ultimately did.”
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines used cell lines descended from fetal tissue aborted in 1973, not to develop the vaccine, but to test whether it worked. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine does not contain fetal cells, but does use cells replicated from tissue aborted in 1985 during its production process.
Despite the wide availability of the vaccines, the United States has struggled to inoculate enough of its population, helping exacerbate the latest surge fueled by the delta variant. Many high-profile faith leaders, however, have pushed back against religious exemptions, urging their flocks to get the jabs.
Pope Francis, last month, urged followers in North and South America to get vaccinated, calling inoculations “an act of love.” The Vatican has also said it is “morally acceptable” to get inoculated with vaccines developed with the aborted fetus cell lines.
Some bishops in some U.S. cities have offered contrasting messages — the Archdiocese of New Orleans, for one, called the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “morally compromised.”
Leaders with the U.S. Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and U.S. Lutheran churches have declined to endorse religious exemptions.