A US Appeals Cout has released a mixed verdict, upholding a Southwest employee’s claims of religious discrimination while dismissing an order for Southwest lawyers to attend a religious liberty training. In 2017, Southwest employee Charlene Carter sued Southwest and the employee union, TWU Local 556, claiming that she was fired due to her religious beliefs on topics like abortion. Carter had joined the union in 1996 but left it in 2013 after she found out dues paid to the union were used to support causes in favor of abortion. However, federal law required her to continue paying dues. In 2017, when she discovered her dues may have been used to pay for others to attend the Women’s March on Washington, DC, an extremely pro-abortion rally, Carter voiced her concerns to union president, Audrey Stone, and voiced her opinion against abortion in several Southwest employee groups. Southwest then fired Carter, stating her posts violated their harassment policies. In 2022, a jury found in Carter’s favor that Southwest had violated Title VII and awarded her $5.1 million. That amount was later reduced to $800,000 by U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr of Texas.

Starr then held Southwest in contempt for not following his orders of informing employees it was not allowed to discriminate against employees based on religious beliefs and order three Southwest attorneys to attend a religious liberty training provided by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, reversed that decision, stating Starr did not have the authority to make such an order. “The attorneys ordered to attend training were not involved in the decision to terminate Carter, and no evidence offered at trial suggests they demonstrated animus against Carter or her religious beliefs. Additionally, the training would not be limited to Title VII training but instead was to encompass topics irrelevant to securing compliance with a Title VII judgment. It was plainly not the least-restrictive means of remedying Southwest’s non-compliance,” wrote Judge Edith Brown Clement. The court also upheld a previous decision that Southwest had discriminated against Carter for her religious practice, but reversed a decision that it had discriminated against her religious belief.

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund, which represented Carter, celebrated the decision to uphold Carter’s claims of religious discrimination. “We hope Carter’s victory today will prompt an overdue conversation about how coercive union boss power infringes on the rights of millions of hardworking Americans,” he wrote. He pushed back against laws that still require Carter to pay dues to a union that supports causes against her religious beliefs. “It is outrageous that, even though the court confirmed that the TWU union and Southwest violated Carter’s legal rights, Carter is still forced to subsidize TWU union bosses or else be fired by Southwest. We hope Carter’s victory today will prompt an overdue conversation about how coercive union boss power infringes on the rights of millions of hardworking Americans.”