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Hot on the heels of ICAN’s successful conclusion of our federal lawsuit to protect the right of West Virginians to obtain religious exemption to school-mandated vaccines, ICAN has filed a suit in state court against the West Virginia Board of Education.
As ICAN recently reported, our “Free the Five” federal West Virginia lawsuit ended with the satisfaction of witnessing parents receive religious vaccine exemptions for the first time ever from the state Department of Health. But those in West Virginia who rule by fear and are opposed to religious liberty have not quit yet—and neither have we.
The West Virginia Board of Education recently announced that it would defy Governor Patrick Morrisey’s executive order, and it instructed schools to not accept religious exemptions being issued by the Department of Health. In a press conference on June 24, 2025, flanked by the Governor, the state’s Secretary of Health, and various members of West Virginia’s legislature, ICAN’s lead attorney, Aaron Siri, announced the filing of another ICAN-funded lawsuit—this time, in state court against the West Virginia Board of Education and others.
Governor Morrisey vowed to support the suit, stating he would not tolerate this infringement on religious freedoms by the “unelected bureaucrats” on the Board and pointed out that his executive order was simply interpreting West Virginia’s Equal Protection for Religion Act (EPRA) that was passed in 2023.
As Siri said during the press conference, the members of the Board of Education want “parents across this state, to adopt their beliefs, over [the parents’] own beliefs. But that’s not how the EPRA works, that’s not how the West Virginia Constitution works, and that’s certainly not what the First Amendment was intended to protect.”
ICAN looks forward to seeing the West Virginia Board of Education in court where our attorneys will once again vigorously defend the religious rights of parents against bureaucrats who assume they know better than parents and God.
Watch Aaron Siri discuss this case tomorrow on The HighWire with Del Bigtree.
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