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Evelyne Shatkin and Linda Shifflett, former administrative workers at the University of Texas at Arlington, filed a lawsuit in December claiming religious discrimination in their firing earlier last year. They said they were only trying to remedy an office dispute when they anointed the door frame of a vacationing coworker’s cubicle with olive oil and prayed for her, but a university official concluded that “praying, shouting and/or chanting over a co-worker’s personal and professional belongings without her knowledge and consent constitutes harassment. . . . In addition, rubbing this co-worker’s cubicle with oil is blatant disregard for university property.”
In Butler County, Ohio, in January four children of the late country songwriter Darrell “Wayne” Perry filed a wrongful-death lawsuit alleging that his evangelist sister Darlene Bishop had convinced him to refuse medical treatment and rely on her prayers to cure his throat cancer, in part by pointing to her own victory over breast cancer. According to the suit, Bishop continued to publicly claim that prayer had healed both her and Perry even though (a) she’d been told by doctors that Perry was not in fact in remission but would soon die and (b) as she admitted at a later deposition, she’d never actually been diagnosed with cancer.
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