A Connecticut Superior Court judge has dismissed the case of parents who challenged the state’s ban on vaccine religious exemptions.
Superior Court Judge Edward Krumeich granted the motion Monday of Democratic Party state officials to dismiss the parents’ claims “without objection.”
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
In the case Spillane v. Lamont, parents filed a challenge alleging the Democratic supermajority passed a new law to deliberately sabotage their original lawsuit.
In 2022, the parents brought their lawsuit alleging the state violated its 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) when it eliminated the religious exemption the year before.
In May – now four years since the parents filed their lawsuit – Democratic Party lawmakers passed an amendment to the religious freedom statute that bars vaccine requirements pertaining to public and private schools from the protections of religious freedom included in the RFRA.
The Connecticut Supreme Court had previously dismissed all of the parents’ claims – except that concerning the violation of the RFRA – sending that one to the Superior Court for consideration.
In response to the Lamont administration’s motion to dismiss the parents’ lawsuit, the parents, represented by their attorney Lindy R. Urso, asserted in August that “[t]his case is a cautionary tale of the dangers of one-party rule with no checks and balances.”
“Our state government has been dominated by the Democrat party for many years now – and that dominance has increased in recent years due to an electorate, in large part blinded by hatred for the current and past US President, who are bafflingly unwilling to vote in a way that might remedy this most dangerous single-party supremacy,” the document asserted.
“The perils of such dominance are exacerbated in this case by the fact that the party in power is, for all intents and purposes, in the pockets of the so-called Deep State in general and Big Pharma in particular,” the plaintiffs’ response continued. “In short, the defendants and their Democrat cohorts throughout our government have used their overwhelming power in the most despicable manner imaginable by enacting a new law that is designed solely to defeat this lawsuit.”
The response statement reflects that, in July 2025, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) – the recipient of large donations from the pharmaceutical industry – announced the organization now “advocates for the elimination of nonmedical exemptions from immunizations as contrary to optimal individual and public health.”
The AAP justified its call for the elimination of exemptions from vaccines by suggesting that those who request religious exemptions are outliers of traditional faith groups.
“Perspectives on vaccines might be drawn from religious traditions that developed independently of the major world religions as well as from the diverse denominational perspectives that exist within major religions,” the AAP policy states. “Just as with other types of doctrines, those related to vaccines might even be developed by small communities or individuals in ways that are completely independent from antecedent scriptural or doctrinal traditions but are, nonetheless, thought of as ‘religious’ commitments by those who hold them.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong celebrated the dismissal of the parents’ lawsuit.
“Vaccines save lives,” Tong said in a statement Monday. “Today’s decision affirms what we have said since day one—Connecticut’s commonsense school vaccine requirements are lifesaving and lawful.”
Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney (D-New Haven) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) also issued a joint statement on Tuesday.
“This ruling is a win for every Connecticut parent who sends a child to school expecting that classroom to be safe from measles,” the Democratic Party leaders said.
“With 98.2 percent of Connecticut kindergartners vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella in the 2024-25 school year, our state is proof that strong school vaccine requirements work,” Looney and Duff added. “While the Trump regime hands national vaccine policy to skeptics and measles outbreaks spread in other states, we will not let Republicans in Washington undo a public health achievement that Connecticut’s doctors, nurses, and parents worked so hard to build.”
Urso, however, told The Epoch Times that officials of the Lamont administration “changed the rules while the contest was underway.”
“There is no triumph in watching the most powerful political actors in Connecticut place the full weight of the government boot upon the necks of families, force those families to fight for years merely to obtain judicial review, and then—when victory is in sight—press the boot down one final time by changing the law,” Urso added. “That is not the majesty of the government. It is precisely this type of abuse of government, trampling on individual liberties, that our state and federal constitutions were designed to prevent.”
In late August, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. weighed in on the debate over religious exemptions.
Kennedy wrote that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D) accusation that he has chosen “to go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and false claims” regarding the presence of aborted fetal tissue in vaccines, is yet another example of Democrats’ attempts to “gaslight” Americans.
Shapiro, the secretary continued, “accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. ‘There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,’ he told me.”
But Kennedy posted to social media a segment of the recorded deposition of Stanley Plotkin – the inventor of the MMR vaccine, who admitted to “butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine,” the secretary said.
Lumen-News reached out for comment to the U.S. Department of Justice but did not receive a response prior to publication. Any comments received will be reflected in an update.
Religious exemptions are well established.