SF Gate: State high court won't hear vegan's 'religion' case

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Wednesday, November 27, 2002 (SF Chronicle)

State high court won't hear vegan's 'religion' case

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

 

 

Vegans may practice their animal-free diets and lifestyles religiously,

but they're not practicing a religion. At least not in the eyes of

California's courts.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday spurned a vegan's appeal on religious-

freedom grounds that he was unfairly denied a job with a health care

company for refusing to be injected with a vaccine grown in chicken

embryos.

By declining to hear the case, the justices left intact the nation's first

known ruling on veganism, the refusal to eat, wear or use animal products,

based on a belief that all species are equal. In September, an appellate

court in Los Angeles found that veganism is a moral philosophy, not a

religion, and therefore those who have adopted it are not protected by

state laws against religious discrimination.

A vegan who heads an organization that promotes plant-based diets said the

lower court's decision was plausible.

" Veganism has nothing to do with faith or whether you believe there's a

god or how we got here. It's a choice that we respect everything on the

planet and we choose not to kill anything, " Caryn Hartglass, executive

director of EarthSave International in Santa Cruz, said at the time. " I

don't think of it as a religion. "

A lawyer for Jerold Friedman, the Southern California computer programmer

who filed the suit, said the ruling defined religion so narrowly that it

favors Western religion at the exclusion of some Eastern religions and

nontraditional faiths.

Attorney Scott Myer said he was disappointed that the state Supreme Court

didn't take up the case, but he hadn't decided whether to appeal to the

U.S. Supreme Court.

The case arose after Friedman, now 33, got a job through a temporary

agency at a Kaiser Permanente pharmacy warehouse in Downey in 1998 and

then was offered a permanent job.

He balked when the company required him to get a mumps vaccine. Friedman

refused to be inoculated because the vaccine had been grown in chicken

embryos.

He said he offered to be checked regularly for symptoms of mumps, but the

company withdrew the job offer.

Friedman could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

 

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko.

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Copyright 2002 SF Chronicle