In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last week, my wife and I warched an episode of the Crimes That Changed Us series on Investigation Discovery on the McMartin preschool case . This was a bizarre, years-long rehearsal of allegations against a Manhattan Beach, CA day care that involved sex abuse of toddlers, a bad clown in a secret underground room, and Satanic sacrifices on the altar of an Episcopal church. None of this could be proven in court, and after two hung juries, the prosecution eventually got tired and dropped all charges The narrator of the episode said the McMartin case was an example of "moral panic". My wife suggested that the current COVID crisis seems like a moral panic as well. I wasn't sure, but the idea was tantalizing enough that I decided to do some research on the web the next day. Moral panics are normally the province of sociology. What I've found is that much of the academic discussion is limited by the current Overton window, and academics will be likely to accept COVID r...

From the Catholic News Agency [San Francisco Abp Salvatore Cordileone] criticized a new health order from the state of California placing San Francisco and San Mateo Counties into a more restrictive tier of coronavirus restrictions, resulting in a ban on indoor worship services. The health order treats religious worship as a “non-essential” activity, while allowing hair and nail salons, massage parlors, and tattoo parlors to remain open, Cordileone noted. “This is precisely the kind of blatant discrimination to which the Supreme Court gave injunctive relief in New York,” he said, referencing a decision Wednesday which blocked New York from similarly closing houses of worship while allowing secular retail venues to remain open. . . . The archbishop recognized concerns over rising COVID hospitalizations, and said he is discerning the proper course of action, with advice from his fellow bishops, archdiocesan lawyers, and infectious disease specialists. Also from the ...

As reported here, "Under new lockdown restrictions in Manitoba, no more than five people can gather in one location, including if they remain in their cars." However, a church in Steinbach, MB elected to hold a drive-in service in violation of the order. The RCMP, of all agencies, then blocked the highway leading to the church parking lot to prevent this. From episodes like this, it seems like Canada is an order of magnitude crazier than the US on COVID restrictions, and the US is pretty crazy. But in the US, police agencies began to recognize even last spring that hauling moms off in cuffs for taking their kids to the playground was a bad look, and they dropped it. Now, poliec agencies back off this sort of thing, with the chiefs saying in one way or another that they don't enforce health orders. Manitoba borders the US states of Minnesota and North Dakota and has had 16,483 COVID cases total, with 301 deaths. for a case fatality rate of about 0.02%. Manitoba's ...

On Nov 23, the Thomas More Society announced that it had filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the US Supreme Court on behalf of South Bay United Pentecostal Church in San Diego. This is essentially a renewal of a petition for certiorari that the court deniedd in a 5-4 vote last May. The announcement quotes special counsel Charles LiMandri, “Governor Newsom, in revising his reopening restrictions under his new California ‘Blueprint’ framework, has not only continued his disparate treatment of places of worship but has exacerbated the discrimination by targeting a core practice of South Bay’s religious expression – the ability to raise one’s voice to worship God in song." This has been a concern I've had since the start of lockdowns, that government assumes the ability not just to limit or prohibit attendance at religious services, but to regulate liturgical practice. Choral singing, chanting, congregational responses, use of pew hymnals and missals, and processio...

Toronto is less than a hundred miles from Buffalo, but I couldn't help but notice a contrast. Over the US holiday, photos and videos of Toronto police arresting restaurant owner Adam Skelly for trying to reopen his barbeque vent viral. Commentators saw at least eight units and ten officers on the scene, which was little short of a SWAT deployment. Skelly was unarmed and faced charges like operating a business without a license. A week ago in Buffalo, three sheriff's deputies and a health inspector entered a gym to try to disperse members who were holding a meeting . It sounds as if the members had had some type of legal advice, as they shouted at the deputies that they were in effect conducting a warrantless search, and under the US Fourth Amendment, they were trespassing on private property. After some shilly-shallying and scolding from the health inspector, they were prevailed upon to leave the building and then the parking lot. Nobody was cuffed and hauled away to jail l...

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 Roc...

This is being widely covered, for instance here , so I'm not going to go into specifics. On one hand, this is something that should have been done last May, when the court refused to hear similar California cases, at least psrtly on the basis that Gov Newsom loosened the restrictions once the suits were brought. But that didn't deal with the reality that all such restrictions are subject to the governor's whim,. and six weeks later, Newsom simply reimposed the restrictions he'd lifted. Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent from the new ruling said that Cuomo had lifted the strictest restrictions as soon as the suit was filed, but the majority recognized that Cuomo, like Newsom, could pull the same ploy and issued an injunction against enforcing them, whether he'd temporarily lifted them or not. For the court to deal with this has been overdue, since such extreme restrictions are in force elsewhee. The court''s decision noted inconsistencies in capacity ...