Another Free-Exercise Case Goes To The Supreme Court

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a petition for injunctive relief that's gone to the court from a New Jersey SSPX priest and an Orthodox rabbi. I covered this case in its initial phase on my old blog here. In another case, Harvest Rock Church of Pasadena, CA has petitioned for injunctive relief pending appeal in its federal lawsuit against California lockdown orders. This is the same type of relief the court granted the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the New York synagogues Wednesday night.

One possible difference among the suits is that Harvest Rock Church has been deliberately violating the California orders, while as far as I can determine, the other churches and synagogues have not. An argument the Catholic diocese made in its case was that it had been following the existing rules prior to Gov Cuomo's red-light order, and in following those rules, it had seen no COVID cases. The court in its opinion recognized this argument in the diocese's favor.

Harvest Rock is in a different position, since it's one of three Southern California megachurches that resumed worship last May without masks or social distancing. All three claim that there have been minimal p;ositive tests among their thousands of attendees since that time, and apparently no hospitalizatins. (I assume that local media would cover more numerous positives or any hospitalizations heavily if they took place.) How the court will react to this difference remains to be seen.

It isn't entirely clear if in fact the New York synagogues had been violating previous, less restrictive COVID orders prior to Gov Cuomo's imposition of "red zone" orders. Certainly the implication of Cuomo's remarks, as well as press coverage, was that the Jews had somehow been wrecking things for everyone else and needed to be curbed, so this may have been an issue.

The conundrum at the basis of all COVID restrictions is that they don't seem to have any effect on testing rates in particular. The states with the tightest new restrictions had had stringent ones before the latest spike. Most of California already prohibited indoor church services and required masks and social distancing. Choral singing and congregational response were also prohibited. There have been equivalent, though looser, controls over most other acitivity, including retail shopping. In California, masks are ubiquitous.

Yet the response of civil authorites has been to scold the population for not being safe enough, when it appears that people have been following all appropriate guidelines, and in fact nobody seems to be asking why, if the guidelines are being followed, cases are spiking. If the only answer is to tighten controls still more, that will simply mean an indefinite renweed stay-at-home lockdown, which is in fact what's being threatened, with the implication that this is the fault of the citizenry, who will deserve it.

At the same time, the authorities seem generally to be aware that a new lockdown will probably result in civil unrest. In addiiton, If COVID control measures continue to be arbitrary and ineffective -- as they're more and more appearing to be -- this will damage the ability of health officials to control future epidemics. That so far, there's been no effective leadership in this area at either the state, national, or global level has been the unacknowledged crisis of 2020.