{"id":3032,"date":"2010-01-07T22:47:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T06:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=3032"},"modified":"2015-06-27T19:16:23","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T22:16:23","slug":"atheist-lawsuit-against-us-military-dismissed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/07\/atheist-lawsuit-against-us-military-dismissed\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheist Lawsuit Against US Military Dismissed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chalker v Gates<\/em>, the lawsuit which pitted the MRFF and an atheist\u00a0Soldier against the Department of Defense,\u00a0has been dismissed<\/a>.\u00a0 The case was brought by\u00a0Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and\u00a0US Army Specialist Dustin Chalker.\u00a0\u00a0The primary complaint<\/a> was that Chalker was forced to attend formations at which Christian prayers were given, though Weinstein used the lawsuit as a forum to accuse the military of promoting Christianity.<\/p>\n

According to various reports<\/a>,<\/p>\n

US District Judge Kathryn Vratil ruled Thursday that Chalker failed to exhaust all available remedies before filing suit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Weinstein has said he will appeal the decision.<\/p>\n

The ruling that dismissed the lawsuit (pdf)<\/a> is slightly<\/em> more complex than the media summary.\u00a0 The ruling stated:\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The Court finds that plaintiffs’ claims are nonjusticiable because plaintiffs did not exhaust intramilitary remedies and finds that this case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first part of the ruling has been frequently discussed on this site; if a plaintiff does not exhaust the opportunities available to him in the military, the courts will not intervene.<\/p>\n

The second part of the ruling\u00a0appears to be related to the first.\u00a0 In essence, it appears<\/em> the court weighed Chalker’s unsupported claims against the DoD’s affidavits (which the MRFF did not refute), agreed that Chalker had not exhausted his remedies (despite his assertions that he had), and therefore concluded that it did not have subject matter jurisdiction over a matter the military had not had an opportunity to resolve.<\/p>\n

To expand, in the Department of Justice’s Motion to Dismiss<\/a>, the government provided affidavits that directly contravened the plaintiff’s assertion that he had exhausted–or even used<\/em>–the military’s internal grievance system.\u00a0 In its “Decisive Response<\/a>,” the MRFF failed to\u00a0provide any evidence\u00a0to oppose the\u00a0DoJ sworn statements.\u00a0\u00a0The court highlights this\u00a0legal misstep:<\/p>\n

Plaintiffs provide no evidence to refute defendant’s affidavits. Instead, plaintiffs argue that for purposes of this motion, the court “must accept all well-pleaded allegations in the complaint as true.” Plaintiffs ignore the fact that defendant brings this motion under Rule 12(b)(1), which permits the court to review affidavits and other factual submissions to resolve disputed jurisdictional facts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the MRFF tried to say it was “futile” to use the military system, and thus\u00a0Chalker should not be held to that requirement, the court also took them to task:<\/p>\n

Chalker has provided no evidence of even one instance where he was denied intramilitary relief, or when he could not receive timely relief through that process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect, of course, that statement is redundant.\u00a0 Since Chalker and the MRFF never provided any evidence that he used<\/em> the systems, it is logical that they would thus be unable to provide any evidence of that system failing to provide timely relief.<\/p>\n

Since Chalker provided no evidence\u00a0that he used the military processes, and since he failed to refute the sworn statements saying he hadn’t, the court agreed with the DoJ that he had not.\u00a0 That made his case nonjusticiable under precedent, and eliminated\u00a0the court’s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

The charge that the\u00a0plaintiff did not utilize the military grievance system has been identified since the beginning, and because of judicial precedent, it was nearly a silver bullet.\u00a0 In the original iteration of this lawsuit<\/a>, PFC Jeremy Hall sued almost immediately after his alleged mistreatment, making it obvious he had not used the military’s internal systems to address his grievances.\u00a0 When Weinstein filed the Chalker<\/em> lawsuit (and abandoned the Hall<\/em> one<\/a>), it was speculated that the reason he did so was to utilize a ‘better plaintiff.’\u00a0 As noted previously<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Unlike the first lawsuit, it does say that the primary plaintiff, Specialist Dustin Chalker, sought permission not to attend the events through “his chain of command and the equal opportunity process,” which did not yield “satisfactory results.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After it began to emerge that Chalker may not have actually used the military processes, it appears he\u00a0may have\u00a0attempted a do-over: he filed an Equal Opportunity complaint after<\/em> filing the lawsuit<\/a>.\u00a0 Ironically, he filed the EO complaint after receiving<\/em> the accommodation he requested.<\/p>\n

This is the third lawsuit Weinstein has filed that has been dismissed before going to trial. (In fact, no<\/em>\u00a0MRFF lawsuit has survived a motion to dismiss.)\u00a0 The dismissal of this lawsuit\u00a0leaves Weinstein v Ammerman<\/em><\/a>\u00a0as the only\u00a0outstanding Weinstein litigation (though he has threatened others<\/a>), and motions to dismiss have already been filed there as well.\u00a0 Since he failed to follow through on his promise to “re-file [his first] lawsuit as quickly as possible,” it will be interesting to see if he does indeed appeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chalker v Gates, the lawsuit which pitted the MRFF and an atheist\u00a0Soldier against the Department of Defense,\u00a0has been dismissed.\u00a0 The case was brought by\u00a0Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and\u00a0US Army Specialist Dustin Chalker.\u00a0\u00a0The primary complaint was that Chalker was forced to attend formations at which Christian prayers were given, though Weinstein used the lawsuit as a forum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[20,4,125,19,126,85,2,5218,7,17,10,65],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-atheism","tag-churchandstate","tag-dustin-chalker","tag-government","tag-jeremy-hall","tag-mikey-weinstein","tag-military","tag-military-religious-freedom-foundation","tag-mrff","tag-religious-expression","tag-religion","tag-usafa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}