 An airline attendant named Charlene Carter was fired from her job at Southwest Airlines in 2017 after working there for 20 years following a dispute that she got into with her union boss over the issue of abortion. Now she took issue with other flight attendants attending the Women's March after Trump was inaugurated because she felt like these women were against Trump's anti-abortion stance and that offended her as a Christian. Now specifically she accused the union of using dues to pay for the flight attendant's trips to the Women's March, but the confrontation got even uglier than that and ultimately resulted in her termination. Now as CBS News explains, Carter sent a series of Facebook messages, some containing videos of purported, aborted fetuses to Audrey Stone, who was president of the union at the time. She called Stone despicable and said she would be voted out of office. According to court documents the airline said it fired Carter because posts on her Facebook page in which she could be identified as a Southwest employee were highly offensive and that her private messages to Stone were harassing. The airline said she violated company policies on bullying and use of social media. Now in response to her termination she filed a workplace discrimination lawsuit against the company and her former union and she claimed that the union retaliated against her for expressing her sincerely held religious views, i.e. her stance on abortion. Now her case ended up going to trial and she won. A jury sided with her and she was reinstated and not only that she was awarded $4.15 million from Southwest Airlines and $950,000 from the Transport Workers Union who represented her. Now in order to understand why the jury possibly sided with her we're going to listen to her attorney Mark Knicks. Side note here, be sure to look at the background and notice the network that he's on. This is the dark underbelly of union representation. I mean these are the union officials that stand up and say you know we're all brothers and sisters and we're fighting for each other and we want to represent you. Well in this case Charlene and others in the union, other workers in the union were basically being criticized and being harassed by union activists and actually even talking with Southwest employees and the HR department talking about how you know this certain worker is a cancer in the workplace and we have to have these targeted assassinations to get rid of these people. And yeah one email said that Charlene's head would explode if she actually knew what the union had spent their money on over the last 17 years. I mean this is the power and the kind of lack of accountability that exists in labor policy in America when you give union officials the ability to speak for someone without their consent to associate with them without their consent even though they worked and you know they may work against changing the union or trying to reform the union from the inside out. These are the types of things that happen when a government grants union officials monopoly power over American workers and these emails are evidence of all of that. Yeah so she was represented pro bono by the National Right to Work Committee whose sole purpose is to sabotage unions across the country at the behest of large multinational corporations. Now this woman very clearly had an axe to grind with unions in general and she supported Right to Work herself so they thought hey we have this disgruntled worker who got into a dispute with her union. Let's capitalize on this opportunity to push Right to Work and if you watch that full interview half of it is him just advocating for a national Right to Work law which would destroy unions effectively. But to be fair to this woman even if she may have been a right-wing The emails that came out during discovery where the union bosses joked about assassinating people like her did not make them look good and I'm assuming that that probably is what convinced the jury to side with her as opposed to the union bosses. But overall to me putting aside the specifics and who was guilty when I look at the details it doesn't really feel like this is a religious discrimination suit right. It doesn't feel like she proved religious discrimination. It seems like they didn't like her and perhaps did retaliate against her because she was an insufferable right-wing provocateur. But having said that though you know even right-wing provocateurs can't be fired without cause they can't be retaliated against. Worker rights protect all workers right. But when it comes to the idea that this was religious discrimination it just doesn't seem very plausible to me. Sure the union bosses fan the flames. I'm not I'm not going to denounce the worker exclusively here because it seems like they also played a role. But I mean regardless of what I think a jury determined that her termination was the result of religious discrimination. But nearly a year later the judge in that specific case is responding to that claim with a brazenly unconstitutional punishment for Southwest's attorneys. Quote US district judge Brantley Starr issued an order Monday that three senior Southwest Airlines lawyers attend eight hours of religious liberty training this month as part of court-ordered sanctions in an employment law case brought by a flat attendant who claimed religion-based discrimination. What's more Starr a Trump appointee and former long-term lawyer in the Texas Attorney General's office specified that the Airlines lawyers must take this religious liberty training from the far-right Christian extremist legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom. Now just so we're crystal clear here a judge is ordering religious liberty training but that's not all. Said training must be given by the Alliance Defending Freedom which is insane to put it mildly. Now if you're unfamiliar with the ADF the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them as an extremist group and for good reason. They write founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian right the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the United States and criminalization abroad has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia and claims that a homosexual agenda will destroy Christianity and society. ADF also works to develop religious liberty legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion since the election of President Trump ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration's attack on LGBTQ rights. So we have a judge in a country by the way where church and state is supposed to be constitutionally separate that is mandating attorneys to attend a religious liberty training course from a Christian hate group that wants to criminalize every single aspect of queer existence. Now in 2023 America with how bad our judiciary has been fucked by Trump's far-right appointed justices and judges you know it's not surprising that a judge is doing this but it's really not surprising that this judge chose this particular group given his own history of anti-LGBTQ plus hate. In fact ahead of his confirmation Lambda Legal actually sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging against this confirmation warning Mr. Starr has been a vocal opponent of LGBTQ non-discrimination protections throughout his career and they later add it is impossible to believe that he could administer fair and impartial justice to LGBT litigants appearing before him. Now that was one of many warnings that the Senate Judiciary Committee received but obviously he was still confirmed and since his confirmation queer litigants have been fearful of his bias. For example in 2019 a trans woman wanted him to recuse himself from a lawsuit that she filed over her treatment in a Texas jail citing his record of anti-LGBTQ plus bias but he refused to do so and now we're learning that he thinks a suitable punishment for attorneys is religious liberty training from an anti-LGBTQ plus extremist hate group and this group has gained a lot of legal clout thanks to judges like him. The new republic explains it's hard to overstate ADF's role in rolling back civil liberties. One of its lead lawyers is Aaron Holly who is married to far-right senator Josh Holly. ADF helped overturn Roe v. Wade and then sued to remove Mipha Pristone one of the drugs used in medication abortions from the national market. That case is still a limbo as the Fifth Circuit Court has yet to issue a ruling. ADF also represented the plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court case 303 creative V. Lennis. Web designer Laurie Smith was suing to have the right to refuse services to LGBTQ people. The design request she claimed she received that prompted her suit appears to have been entirely fabricated. Yeah now the organization responsible for that is now teaching religious liberty courses because a judge is mandating it absurd. Now the question is why is this judge doing this aside from him being a biased far-right extremist himself? We get that you know he supports this organization because he agrees with them but legally speaking why is he issuing this punishment to southwest attorneys when they already lost right? This is a year later after the case was decided. Well get this the sanctions in large part were ordered as a result of the fact that following a jury loss in the employment case southwest was supposed to send out a notice that it quote may not discriminate against flight attendants on the basis of their religious practices and beliefs but instead sent out a notice that it quote does not discriminate and a follow-up memorandum about civility. That certainly warrants religious liberty training from a far-right extremist hate group. Now the implications of this are obviously horrifying. Slate's Mark Drossof Stern explains if upheld Trump's judge Brantley Star's order would let courts force lawyers to undergo religious indoctrination sessions from an extremist group that may well contradict their own deeply held spiritual beliefs and freedom of speech. This cannot possibly be legal. He adds during oral arguments in 303 Creative Justice Gorsuch claimed Colorado put Jack Phillips through a re-education training program when it ordered him to stop discriminating against same-sex couples. Now a Trump judge is forcing lawyers into an actual re-education program. Exactly. I mean imagine what the right would say if a liberal judge required that a company and their attorneys who were found legally liable for LGBTQ discrimination had to attend a drag show or something. I mean it's just this is so absurd and if the stands we are opening the door to more judges mandating religious indoctrination from hate groups. And if you think that Brantley Star is unhinged I mean imagine what other far-right activist judges would require of litigants. I mean Judge Eileen Cannon look at her I mean there's so many insane justices and judges throughout the country that the possibilities are endless and they are creative with the ways in which they want to indoctrinate all of us and force their religion and hate down our throats. So I mean it's something that is dangerous it's illegal but it is entirely unsurprising when our judicial system has been hijacked by corrupt far-right extremists.