A woman discharged from the Marine Corps for violating multiple direct orders is fighting to the highest military court.
Military Times (“Bible verse sends former Marine back to court“):
The case involves former Lance Cpl. Monifa Sterling, who in May 2013 was assigned at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to a desk job handling complaints from other Marines experiencing issues with their Common Access Cards.
Sterling taped three paper copies of the same quote — “No weapon formed against me shall prosper” — in 28-point type on her computer’s tower, her monitor and her desk. The line is a variant of a passage from Isaiah 57:14; Sterling said the three copies reflected the Trinity.
A native New Yorker and Christian who does not affiliate with a particular denomination, Sterling told military officials that the posted passage helped her summon patience when dealing with short-tempered Marines who were frustrated with their CAC problems.
But Sterling’s staff sergeant didn’t like the passages and ordered her to remove them. When Sterling refused, the staff sergeant ripped them off herself. The next day, Sterling replaced the passages with new ones, and the staff sergeant removed those as well.
Ultimately, Sterling was charged with violation of a lawful order and that, along with other low-level misconduct, led to her court-martial conviction and a sentence of reduction in rank to E-1 and a bad-conduct discharge.
In Sterling’s first appeal, the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Appeals in February upheld the conviction. A military judge determined that the quotations, “could be interpreted as combative … [and] could easily be seen as contrary to good order and discipline,” court records show.
Now Sterling is taking her case to the military’s highest court, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
[…]
The religious freedom law at issue is the same one invoked last year before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that some employers should be exempted from the national health care reform law that requires companies to provide coverage of contraception for women. The plaintiff in that case, the Hobby Lobby, also was represented by Clement.
The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces will decide later this year whether to hear the case and schedule oral arguments.
Other convictions included in Sterling’s original case involved charges of refusing orders to perform duties for which Sterling said she was medically exempted. Those charges and convictions factored into her sentencing, but are not the subject of her current appeal to the military high court.
One of the key reasons Sterling’s appeal was previously denied is because the desk where she taped those Bible passages was used and visible to other Marines.
“The risk that such exposure could impact the morale or discipline of the command is not slight,” the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Appeals concluded in February.
“Maintaining discipline and morale in the military work center could very well require that the work center remain relatively free of divisive or contentious issues such as personal beliefs, religion, politics, etc., and a command may act pre-emptively to prevent this detrimental effect,” the court ruled.
I don’t see how Hobby Lobby applies here. Sterling was not only a government employee, rather than the private citizen running a public accommodation, but a uniformed member of the armed forces. Government employees have substantially less expressive right in the workplace than is typical in the private sector, simply because our expression might be construed as government policy. Military personnel have more restrictions still because of the need for “good order and discipline.” There’s a long history of case law in support of these principles.
Sterling’s case gets even less complicated given that she was repeatedly ordered by her superiors to take down the verses. If she believed her staff sergeant’s order was illegal, she had every right to appeal it up the chain of command or even write her Congressman. She had no right at all to ignore it, let alone defy it repeatedly and brazenly.
This is sufficiently clear cut that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if court decided not to take the appeal at all.
