Just before New Year’s Eve, Rademacher and his former employer, ABC, filed their respective briefs in a soap operatic case that raises genuinely serious debate on how courts should grapple with the meaning of religion and the place of politics in our society.
Rademacher, after all, doesn’t actually belong to an organized church. Yet he maintains that it’s God’s will that he not inject himself with a substance he believes is foreign to nature. He’s now claiming religious discrimination, to which the Disney unit responds that taking care of one’s physical body lacks any “metaphysical element” and needn’t be accommodated. “Rademacher’s beliefs are not ‘religious’ in nature,” Steven Marenberg, the attorney representing ABC, told the Los Angeles judge overseeing the case.
As for politics, Rademacher’s attorney Scott Street amended the complaint late last year to add a new theory of liability: that Disney was discriminating against the soap star on the basis of his politics, which “did not align with the views being promoted by ABC/Disney, especially its view on universal vaccination as a political tool to end the pandemic.” Rademacher, who has been a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, says that internal ABC documents show the network began preparing to fire him before its mandate went into effect, when he began to speak openly about his anti-vaxx beliefs.
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