TRO Denied In Challenge To Navy's Chaplain Selection System

In Adair v. England, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7367 (D DC, Feb. 28, 2006), the DC federal district court refused to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the Navy from discharging plaintiff Michael Belt and other naval chaplains from active duty, finding that they were unlikely to succeed on the merits and had not show irreparable injury. A group of evangelical chaplains who are plaintiffs in the long-running litigation charged that the Navy maintains an unconstitutional religious quota system that favors hiring, promoting and retaining chaplains from liturgical Christian denominations at a rate greater than the liturgical Christians' representation among all Navy personnel. They also challenge the Navy's chaplain-promotion system, including placing more than one Catholic chaplain on promotion boards, the use of chaplains to rate other chaplains, the application of "faith group identifier" codes, and the general domination of the boards by liturgical Protestant and Catholic chaplains.