A federal judge in Dallas sanctioned Southwest Airlines on Monday, and the judge’s order requires three of the company’s lawyers to undergo religious bias training.
U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr found Southwest Airlines in contempt for disregarding his previous order against the company in a religious liberty case it lost last year.
In addition, lawyers Kerrie Forbes, Kevin Minchey, and Chris Maberry were ordered to take a “training on religious freedom” from the prominent Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.
“Forbes, Minchey, and Maberry were at the root of the problem,” Starr wrote in the Monday decision. “Accordingly, the Court directs Southwest to send those individuals to religious-liberty training in the hopes that, on round two, that training will coerce compliance with (instead of the continued undermining of) the Court’s orders in this case.”
Mark Shaw, Southwest’s executive vice president and chief legal and regulatory officer, is not named in the order. It is unclear whether he had any direct oversight of the personnel and actions that led to the judge’s rebuke.
The previous case centered on Charlene Carter, who claimed she was fired from Southwest in response to her openly anti-abortion views.
Carter said she was terminated because she called her union president “despicable” for attending the pro-abortion Women’s March in 2017 and for protesting the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
She won the case in December, and Judge Starr ruled that Southwest and the Transport Workers Union must provide her with the maximum compensation for damages under federal law.
Southwest, which is based in Dallas, was also required by the December order to send a notice to its employees that makes clear the company is not allowed to discriminate against religious beliefs. But the airline instead sent a statement that claimed the company does not discriminate against its employees.
Starr mocked this notice in Monday’s ruling, likening Southwest’s response to Adam telling God, “‘I do not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden’ — while an apple core rests at his feet.”
“It’s hard to see how Southwest could have violated the notice requirement more,” Starr wrote. “In the universe we live in — the one where words mean something — Southwest’s notice didn’t come close to complying with the Court’s order.”
Starr’s ruling on Monday required Southwest to reissue a proper notice on religious discrimination to its employees.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation, which represents Carter, said he hopes Southwest has finally learned its lesson on respecting the right to religious expression.
“Southwest’s past behavior against Carter was discriminatory and illegal, and the District Court’s order rightly shuts down Southwest Airlines’ bald-faced attempt to dodge its responsibility to inform flight attendants of its wrongdoing,” Mix said in a statement sent to The Dallas Express.
“Hopefully, this order provides hope to other independent-minded workers that their right to express their religious dissent against union and company political agendas cannot so easily be waved away,” he added.
Monday’s decision is not the first time Judge Starr reprimanded Southwest in Carter’s legal proceedings. The judge granted sanctions against Southwest in November when the company failed to clear the schedule of one of its employees who was ordered to testify in a deposition.
Southwest told The Dallas Express it plans to appeal the recent court order and is in the process of appealing the original decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
