A federal judge has ordered three lawyers for Southwest Airlines to submit to “religious-liberty training” after it fired a flight attendant for her anti-abortion stance.
US District Judge Brantley Starr said the three legal eagles need to hone up on religious freedoms after defying his court orders in the flight attendant’s case — and said conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom “is particularly well-suited” to set them straight.
While critics questioned the ruling, a spokesman for the group defended the judge’s ruling.
“The judge’s order calls for ADF to provide training in religious liberty law — not religious doctrine,” Jim Campbell, the group’s chief counsel, told Fortune magazine.
“It is baseless to suggest that people of faith cannot provide legal instruction if their beliefs differ from the audience.”
Starr, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump in 2019, is the nephew of former special counsel Kenneth Starr, who spent years probing Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged Whitewater scandal and uncovered the 42nd commander in chief’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
The judge issued the ruling in the Southwest case after he said lawyers for the airline needed to brush up on the law after flight attendant Charlene Carter sued over her termination and won.
Carter, who had been on the job for more than 20 years, was fired after she posted a series of social media messages slamming the flight attendant union boss for attending the anti-Trump, pro-abortion Women’s March in Washington, DC, in January 2017.
“You truly are despicable in so many ways,” Carter allegedly wrote in one message, which included an attached video of an aborted fetus, Fortune reported.
She took her case to arbitration after she was fired but lost — yet filed a lawsuit and was awarded $5.1 million by a Dallas jury last year — although Starr later lowered the award to $800,000.
The airline and the union are appealing the verdict.
