What's Going On In California?

As far as I'm aware, none of the usual suspects among the California civil authorities has made any direct statement about either the November 25 US Supreme Court ruling in Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo, or the December 3 ruling in Harvest Rock Church, et al. v Newsom The impression I have is that the LA County Health Department was fully aware of the November 25 ruling and what it telegraphed when it issued a new lockdown order on Nov 27 that prohibited all public and private gatherings "except for faith based services and protests, which are constitutionally protected rights."

The worship service exception under the constitution was completely new.

On the other hand, both LA Mayor Garcetti and Gov Newsom have been in a new lockdown frenzy. Garcetti issued new stay-at-home orders on November 17, which he said at the time were to be in effect "for the next two to three weeks." But two to three weekw later, viz, just yesterday, he announced even stricter orders. prohibiting most walking, driving, travel on public transport, bikes, motorcycles, or scooters.

No meention of going to church, though. He left that out.

Meanwhile, also yesterday, Gov Newsom added a whole new criterion to his color-coded lockdown scheme. ICU capacity, which apparently now supplements cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and conveniently will kick in "within days"":

Regions of California where hospitals are in danger of overload will be subject to a new stay-at-home order, with some parts of the state projected to reach that point later this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday.

The new order will apply in regions where available intensive care unit capacity drops below 15%, according to the Newsom administration.

. . . In regions where intensive care unit capacity falls below the threshold, the new stay-at-home order will bar nonessential gatherings and require people to stay at home as much as possible to avoid transmitting the virus. It will allow people to continue with essential activities like going to the doctor, buying groceries and picking up takeout.

Newsom's order, like Garcetti's, makes no mention of church services. San Francisco Abp Cordileone, noted here as a leader of the free exercise movement, issued this statement after the Dec 3 Supreme Court ruling:

[T}he Supreme Court clearly ruled governments may not favor secular indoor activities, such as indoor retail, over worship. The same restrictions must, at a minimum, be applied to both.

. . . Worship is not less important than shopping for shoes; it is certainly more important to people’s spiritual and psychological health; it is a natural and Constitutional right, and we Catholics have shown for months that we can worship safely–with masks, social distancing, ventilation, and sanitation.

We prefer not to go to court to win this fight. We prefer, and have been working hard for a long time to achieve, resolving this impasse with mutual understanding and respect. That would save a lot of valuable time and resources. It would also help to build up good will.

Let my people worship.

It's hard to decouple the increasingly hysterical and draconian threats of new lockdowns from Newsom and Garcetti from the recent Supreme Court decisions, even though they seem to make an effort not to mention them.

The problem is, and the Nov 27 opinions from the Court make this point, that the civil authorities have had almost a year to solve the virus. But as of December, Gov Newsom is making the same pleas he made last April, in the same words, "We intend to bend the curve".

What was that about doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result? The frenzied, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach speaks of panic and fecklessness. But it sounds as though key players are losing patience.