In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Thanks to a visitor, via Lifesite News: the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out a California order banning all in-person worship and granted Harvest Rock Church an opportunity to present evidence prior to the country’s top court making a judgement on the matter. [Note: the California order bans indoor worship, not in-person worship.] “The application for injunctive relief, presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court, is treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment, and the petition is granted,” stated the Supreme Court’s Dec. 3 order. The Supreme Court “vacated” the lower court order against the California Christian churches were California Governor Gavin Newsom’s worship ban was upheld, stripping it of its effects. . . . The Supreme Court in its order today sent the case back down to the lower court, telling it to consider its ruling in light of the Court’s Nov. 26 ruling against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on places of w...

US flu outbreaks in recent decades include Asian Flu (1957-58), Bird Flu (1997-98), and Swine Flu (2009-2010). Although the discussions I've found indicate that they were comparable to COVID, they resulted in no calls for draconian social controls. In fact, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, while it was far more severe than any of the more recent epidemics, didn't cause equivalent moral panic. Restrictions on social gatherings and public meetings were of much shorter duration and far more limited. (No Spaniards were vilified, either.) There was apparently something missing, particularly from the flu epidemics of the 1990s and 2000s, that might otherwise have caused the widespread calls for drastic social controls we've seen with COVID. This suggests, if the premise that COVID is a moral panic is correct, that social tensions exist now that didn't in recent decades. What might they be? One way to try to answer this question is to ask what groups are identified with the crisis...

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...