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James Childs is suing the superintendent of MSAD 52 and Maine Department of Education Commissioner Pender Makin because his son, a rising eighth-grader in the Turner-Greene-Leeds district, stands to be barred from school. Maine eliminated religious exemptions for school vaccinations in 2021. Only medical exemptions remain. Childs and the Idaho-based group We The Patriots USA argue the law violates the First Amendment. The same nonprofit has filed parallel suits in California, New York, and Connecticut seeking to restore religious exemptions. The state Attorney General’s Office offered no comment; the district did not respond.
States Still Block Religious Opt-Outs
West Virginia illustrates the same pattern. Governor Morrissey’s 2025 Executive Order 7-25 would have permitted religious exemptions from school vaccine requirements. That order remains on hold while the state Supreme Court reviews it. Jennifer Lilly, a certified registered nurse with the state, stated that immunizations “have always been required” and that “all students in West Virginia have to be immunized in public schools and that’s not changed.” The department of education continues to enforce the pre-order rules as the new school year approaches.
Employers Paid for the Same Denials
Corporate policy followed the same script. Battelle Energy Alliance, operator of an Idaho Falls research facility, agreed to a $5 million settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a systemic investigation found the company denied religious and disability accommodations under its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy. More than 100 employees were affected. The EEOC determined the denials included unlawful medical inquiries, refusal of accommodations, and, in some cases, termination—conduct that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act when no undue hardship is shown.
Scientists Who Closed the Lab Question Privately Reopened It
The same institutional certainty that underpinned many mandates has also cracked on the origin of the virus itself. Authors of the influential paper that dismissed a laboratory origin later admitted private doubt. In a June 11, 2020 Slack message, Scripps Research professor Kristian Andersen wrote: “Gotta say — some smoking(ish) guns starting to appear that I’m not comfortable with.” Responding to research describing the insertion of a furin cleavage site at the precise location later found in SARS-CoV-2, Andersen added that “we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other – and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there.”
Data Centers Draw the Next Line of Resistance
While school and workplace mandates continue to press individual conscience, a parallel fight has opened against the physical infrastructure of the emerging surveillance and AI economy. On July 18, opponents staged 142 protests across 42 states against the rapid build-out of data centers. The coordinated actions, organized by HumansFirst, targeted what the group calls the “unaccountable” expansion and its “unacceptable infringement on our liberty.” Signs in Fredericksburg, Virginia, read “We thrive on water not data.” In Atlanta, protesters noted that “Georgia never voted for hyperscale AI data centers.”
Erin Brockovich has turned the local complaints into a public registry. After receiving dozens of emails from residents living near these facilities, she launched brockovichdatacenter.com so people can self-report impacts on water, power, and community life. “This is a place where people who I believe are living, breathing, and experiencing these issues are the best source of information,” she said.
The physical limits are already visible. PJM Interconnection, the regional grid serving 67 million customers across 13 states and the District of Columbia, failed for the third consecutive year to secure enough future power. Its auction for the year beginning June 2028 fell 6.8 gigawatts short—the equivalent of nearly seven nuclear reactors—driven largely by demand from Virginia’s Data Center Alley, the densest concentration of such facilities in the country. An emergency procurement process later this year is expected to shift more of the generation burden onto the hyperscalers themselves.
The pattern is consistent: religious conviction treated as optional, scientific uncertainty papered over in public while acknowledged in private, and community consent bypassed for infrastructure that consumes water and power at industrial scale. The Maine lawsuit is one father’s attempt to reclaim the boundary the state erased.
