Southern California Pushes Back

Per the Desert Sun,

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco has issued a video statement decrying Gov. Gavin Newsom's plans to impose shutdowns across the state due to surging COVID-19 cases, and repeating his objection to penalizing those who don't follow the new protocols.

Bianco said his department won't be "blackmailed, bullied or used as muscle against Riverside County residents in the enforcement of the governor's orders."

The video, which was published on the department's YouTube channel and shared through its social media, shows Bianco in uniform. He accuses Newsom of having a "dictatorial attitude" and being "extremely hypocritical."

Bianco called the stay-at-home orders "flat-out ridiculous."

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva "will not instruct his deputies to enforce a new statewide stay-at-home order announced Thursday that could force businesses to temporarily shut down as coronavirus cases continue to soar."

"I want to stay away from business [sic] that are trying to comply, they bent over backwards to modify their operations to conform to these orders and then they have the rug yanked out from under them, that's a disservice, I don't want to make them more miserable," he told Fox affiliate, KTTV-TV, according to a tweet.

The Orange County Sheriff restated his existing policy on lockdown enforcement:

Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said Saturday that his deputies would not be enforcing the regional stay-at-home order that has been issued for Southern California.

"Compliance with health orders is a matter of personal responsibility and not a matter of law enforcement,'' Barnes said in a statement. "The Orange County Sheriff's Department will remain consistent in our approach.

"Orange County Sheriff's deputies will not be dispatched to, or respond to, calls for service to enforce compliance with face coverings, social gatherings, or stay-at-home orders only."

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office has announced it will not enforce the lockdown orders:

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is aware of the state’s plan to modify the Stay At Home Order depending on the fluctuation of ICU bed availability/capacity in our region. We will continue to work closely with our county and city partners to best serve our communities. As has been the case since we were initially faced with the difficulties of living and working through this pandemic together, our goal is to educate and gain voluntary compliance regarding Public Health orders.

Sheriffs elsewhere in the state have taken similar positions, although many are simply restating positions they've had for much of the year.

A video from a Los Angeles restaurant owner went viral over the weekend:

Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, posted a video on social media after she saw production tents and tables set up in a parking lot just a few feet from the outdoor dining area she's not allowed to use.

People involved in the television production crew were seen dining under the tents.

A basic problem with the lockdown orders is that state and local leadership shows by its own behavior that they don't believe the restrictions are necessary. If Newsom believed either indoor or outdoor dining were dangerous, he wouldn't have attended the pre-Thankstiving party at a Napa restaurant, without a mask. If Mayor Garcetti believed outdoor dining was dangerous, he wouldn't have allowed a TV production company to have catering, after he'd banned it for the plebs. Nor, of course, would the TV producers have eaten there.

What we're looking at is failing leadership, with key players, such as local sheriffs, no longer on board with policies, while the leaders, insisting that the continuing violations of their own orders are just isolated mistakes, simply continue an established pattern of hypocrisy.

Instead, over the past weeks, the state, county, and city authorities have issued panicked updates to their restrictions every few days, resulting in conflicts, misunderstandings, and absurdly unenforceable edicts. The mayor's latest ukase reads in part:

All travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit is prohibited, subject to the exceptions in Paragraph V.

Observation over the past few days indicates that nobody is taking this seriously; people are going on with their lives. This is simplly not leadership as it is generally understood.

An LA Judge Asks Questions

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant is asking questions few others have posed -- just what is the "science" behind the lockdown orders being promulgated in many US states? LA County banned outdoor dining at restaurants this week in response to a surge in COVID cases. While there is sketchy evidence for COVID transmission at indoor restaurants, there is apparently none at all in the literature for outdoor dining. Banning any restaurant business just before Christmas is, of course, economically disastrous. The judge thinks there ought to be good reasons to do it.

The Daily News reports Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant “appeared sympathetic” to separate lawsuits seeking to lift the restriction filed by the California Restaurant Association and famed attorney Mark Geragos, who owns the Engine Co. No. 28 restaurant in downtown L.A. However, according to the outlet, “Chalfant said he was reluctant to issue an order that could have a major impact on public health without first reviewing scientific data about the danger of coronavirus transmission at an outdoor dining establishment.”

He scheduled another hearing for next Tuesday when public health officials will have an opportunity to bring forth information that backs up their decision to issue such a directive.

“An order to show cause means that Los Angeles County, which has banned outdoor dining at restaurants, must finally step forward and show evidence linking outdoor dining to the ongoing rise in coronavirus cases,” said Jot Condie, president and CEO of the California Restaurant Association. “Their order was arbitrary and targeted restaurants unfairly, without supporting evidence.”

“It is our expectation that if the county is unable to produce evidence justifying this decision, then outdoor dining should be allowed to resume as soon as the stay-at-home order is lifted.”

Wednesday's hearing covered a great deal of ground. Another story gives more detail:

The county, Chalfant said, provided a declaration from Public Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser. He said the county could be overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients but didn’t offer anything to back up his conclusion.

The basis for those conclusions are vital to the county’s argument, Chalfant said.

. . . The county’s attorney Amnon Siegel told Chalfant it would be difficult to provide the “type of scientific certainty and precision” on data the court seeks because infections and hospital bed availability are based on projections that often change.

Chalfant agreed it’s a fluid situation, but not when it comes to intensive care unit beds.

“Those are fixed. It’s not hard to estimate the number of ICU beds,” said Chalfant.

Chalfant said the county also did not provide any evidence it took a risk-benefit analysis on the harm its health order could have on the economy and the mental well-being of Angelenos who lost jobs or can’t go out to eat at a restaurant.

“Which is frankly a big hole” in the county’s case, said Chalfant.

. . . he asked why the county didn’t have more information on the risks of outdoor dining, nine months into the pandemic.

This last question is one other key players are finally beginning to ask -- why, after nearly a year of COVID, do the highly paid health experts still know so little about the virus and how it's spread? Where is the actual research behind all the unprecedented restrictions?

Judge Chalfant has also presided over the separate Grace Community Church case, where he has allowed that church to continue to hold indoor services while the case moves through the system.

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.

US Supreme Court Appears To Block California Restrictions On Worship

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 worship. In that case, it blocked the governor from enforcing the limits against religious buildings and places of worship.

Via Reuters,

The justices, with no noted dissents, set aside a lower court ruling that rejected a challenge to Newsom’s policy by Harvest Rock Church Inc, which has several campuses in the state, and Harvest International Ministries Inc, an association of churches. Both are based in Pasadena, a city in Los Angeles County.

Prof Wiliam Jacobson remarks,

There were no dissents from the Order, reflecting that the fight has been won by the 5-4 majority in the Diocese of Brooklyn case.

Via USA Today:

The Supreme Court ordered California judges Thursday to follow its lead in blocking stringent coronavirus restrictions on houses of worship, as the high court did in a New York case last week.

The justices' unsigned order sending a California church's challenge back to lower courts likely will stop Gov. Gavin Newsom from prohibiting most indoor religious services.

Exactly how this will affect actual worship plans by churches in most parts of the state isn't completely clear. Certainly the three Los Angeles area megachurches that have defied Newsom's order up to now will continue, such as Grace Comminity Church in the photo above, with a much diminished threat posed by their ongoing legal cases.

I assume, though, that other churches, including Roman Catholic dioceses, will need to plan more fully how to resume indoor worship. I would expect they would continue, at least for the time being, to require masks and social distancing indoors, as well as to provide an outdoor seating option for communicants who wish to continue that way. I'll be covering this with great interest.

However, with the advent of cooler weather in the state, a resumption of indoor worship comes at a providential time.

What Are The Social Tensions Underlying The COVID Panic?

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 -- in sociological terms, the "folk devils". In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the moral enforcers have been definite on one question, that the country in which the crisis originated, China, is the one group that's definitely not at fault. This at minimum suggests that if the Chinese food markets or flu labs aren't at fault, something else at least must be, and the enforcers must know who they are.

Well, what groups are most disadvantaged by the COVID controls? Most visibly, it's the more observant Christians and Orthodox Jews, who are the ones who've been systematically suing civil authorities for relief or commiting civil disobedience. Another group is small businesses, who are disadvantaged by restrictions that require them to close, when equivalent mail order and big-box retailers can stay open. A third group is food service and personal service workers, like waiters, bartenders, barbers, and cosmeticians. (Those who work for cash or tips aren't even covered in government relief programs.)

Thus the groups most affected are observant believers, the entrepreneurial working class, and the working poor. Given the moral enforcers have begun to extend their prohibitions to family-oriented holiday celebrations, imposing severe limits on the size of even family gatherings and discouraging holiday travel, the group being singled out for adverse treatment extends even beyond Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews to non-observant people who operate within traditional family and community-oriented value sets.

People in this group are often portrayed as carrying on with traditional activities in ignorance of their newly discovered epidemiological effects, or deliberately engaging in superspreader events while disregarding the destructive effects on society out of pure self-indulgence or "science denial". Church services and Trump rallies are chief offenders here, but others include wedding or holiday celebrations in excess of the circumscribed limits, and unauthorized parties in the Hollywood Hills.

So the groups deemed most responsible for COVID spread turn out to be those most affected by the controls, and the continued spread of infections irrespective of controls is blamed on the unwillingness of the affected groups to abide by the controls, when it's fairly plain that the public does wear masks, is socially distanced, and simply can't get haircuts or facials or go to restaurants, which are closed. The most prominent violators, the Califonmia megachurches, actually record minimal infections. Grace Community Church was in fact officially cleared of a charge that it had experienced a COVID outbreak.

The key marker for identifying anyone in the bad group is refusal to wear a mask. Although in the most populous areas, masks are very common, if not de facto compulsory, surges in COVID cases occur notwithstanding. The reaction of political and health authorities is simply to scold the population for not wearing masks or social distancing, when simple observation of conduct on the street indicates that people do in fact wear masks and socially distance. Nobody asks the perfectly reasonable question whether the surges have some other explanation, and nobody tries to answer it.

On the other hand, those least affected by controls outside the 1%, naturally with exceptions, are the college-educated suburban professional class, especially those with undemanding but prestigious office jobs that now have been transformed into work-from-home sinecures. Drs Fauci and Birx, prominent moral entrepreneurs, are representative of this class, with Dr Fauci's working-class accent somehow carrying an aura of quasi-meritocratic authenticity. I'll have more to say about the nature of moral entrepreneurs in a subsequent post. But the more prestigious the people, the more they're entitled to ignore the rules they set up for their inferiors.

Broadly speaking, those are the opposing interests. But prejudice against flyover country or the wrong side of the tracks is nothing new. I saw it daily in the Ivy League as a student there. A moral panic is the result of social tensions. People knew their place back in the day -- what's changed? I would venture that the difference is that the people who used to know their place are getting uppity. As Glenn Reynods, one of the more conventional thinkers around, nevertheless puts it,

What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.

The problem is that the "folk devils" here are roughly half the population in many Western countries, which strikes me as a reason the panic is not sustainable. But the social tension caused by the rise in the classes who owe nothing to the current elites is palpable, and I think it also led to the other moral panic of 2020, the Black Lives Matter riots, which is a whole separate subject I'll defer for now.

2020: The Year Of Moral Panic

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 restrictions as entirely reasonable. I don't agree, and naturally, I won't find conventional discussion necessarily insightful or helpful. But, with reservations, I find the YouTube discussion above is at least a good general introduction to the subject. Other web discussins, like Wikipedia, nevertheless do seem to provide a consensus outline of what a moral panic is:

A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".

In recent centuries the mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests".

Earlier examples of moral panics would include the Salem witch trials and Prohibition. Some discussions trace the incidence of moral panics to the need to resolve an underlying social tension. Prohibition, for instance, has been traced to tensions over immigration, particularly Catholics, who routinely consume wine and other alcohol, whereas nativist Protestants were often teetotal. The narrator of the TV special above traced the McMartin case to bourgeois discomfort over the rising trend of families where both parents have jobs and the resulting need to place children in day care. Both suggestions seem reasonable, and I'll discuss this in tomorrow's post.

So a key first element of a moral panic is a set of conditions that makes a threat to overall social order credible -- and this threat is often identified with a group. What this group is in the case of COVID is also worth separate discussion, although one key factor is that mass media and moral enforcers have emphasized, from the start of the panic, that China, although empirically the place where the COVID virus somehow escaped, is most assuredly not the threat. Odd, no?

The next element of such a panic is "moral entrepreneurs", individuals who become clearly identified with the issue, and who work in concert with, the mass media to articulate the threat in its early phases. In the McMartin case, the key entrepreneur was Judy Johnson, a Manhattan Beach, CA mother who alleged that her toddler son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by a McMartin teacher. As the case developed, Ms Johnson turned out to be mentally unstable, and the charges likely were motivated by the custody battle, but they were enough to incite panic given the underlying social tensions that media and other entrepreneurs could exploit opportunistically. (Ms Johnson subsequently was foud dead at age 42 of alcoholic liver diease in the course of the panic.)

Other moral entrepreneurs emerged, including Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner, who secured grand jurty indictments against every school employee, and Kee MacFarlane, a psychologist who conducted highly questionable interviews with the toddlers, promptng them to confirm stories of secret tunnels, flying witches, children being flushed down toilets, and animals being slaughtered on the altar of a local church.

This leads to another feature of moral panics, that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. In recent times, the disproportion can be overcome by professional credentials among the moral entrepreneurs. In the McMartin case, the bizarre accusations and unbelievable overall narrative were supported by credientialed experts, including a district attorney backed up by professional psychologists and medical doctors.

The life of the McMartin scandal was relatively brief. I think the factors behind this included limited potential gain for the entrepreneurs -- Ms Johnson turned out to be too sick to continue in her campaign -- and other actors were driven by some combination of narcissism and fairly limited prospects for professional advancement, which proved not to be attainable given their overall poor performance in the courtroom.

In addition, the McMartin case proved to be limited in geographic scope, with fairly limited implications for overall social control on the part of the moral enforcers. People still needed day care, so imposing some form of radical control over it was not a realistic goal. Prohibition, on the othr hand, had a much wider scope, though it failed, first practically and soon enough legislatively, because too many people wanted to drink legallly.

Several discussions of moral panics I've found do suggest they have a life cycle, with a "morning after" phase. I'll conside this in subsequent posts as well.

Roman Catholic Bishops Begin Pushback On COVID Restrictions

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 Catholic News Agency,

Kentucky’s four Catholic dioceses will not suspend public Masses despite the governor’s request that religious services be held online only until December 13.

. . . “At this time, we will not be suspending public liturgies but encourage all to act in a responsible way that respects the seriousness of this pandemic and the health and safety of all,” said Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville in a statement on November 19.

I think the subtext here is that, with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn winning its injunction against New York State lockdown orders, the US bishops are beginning to evaluate their options. Abp Cordileone has been in the lead in objectinng to California lockdown measures, while the Archdiocese of New York endorsed the Diocese of Brooklyn's suit when it was filed. That Cordileone would mention that he's getting "advice from his fellow bishops, archdiocesan lawyers, and infectious disease specialists" suggests that serious next steps will be undertaken.

It appears from the direction of both statements that the ecclesiastical authorities intend to regain control over conditioins of worship and liturgy, for now giving communicants discretion over whether to worship in person. I don't know if the bishops would articulate their situation in exactly these terms, but I think they see that we're in a moral panic, where "moral entrepreneurs" have seized public opinion and are controlling public behavior for essentially their own aggrandizement. This would include a public health establishment aligned with leftist politicians who wish to de-privilege a range of social behavior, including Jewish and Christian worship.

Although moderates insist that such measures -- extending not just to church, but increasingly to traditional holiday celebrations like Halloween and Thanksgiving -- are meant to be temporary, other politicians and public health figures telegraph that they're meant to become a "new normal". Even the moderates are vague about just how "temporary" the measures will be, and a consensus seems to be emerging that they won't end with a vaccine. I think the bishops are correct to oppose all such trends, legally and in the public forum.

"Moral enforcers" are also seeking to perpetuate the authority they've gained from the initial crisis, for instance now by insisting that new waves of the virus continue to threaten the social order. The bishops legitimately see themselves as the traditional spokesmen for some part of the social order and are seeking to regain their normal role. Even if they don't necessarily see the current circumstances as a "moral panic", I think they're at least resisting the right symptoms, and for the right reasons. I think Evangelical spokesmen like Pastor John MacArthur are correctly working in the same direction.

The fairly recent notion of "moral panic" does seem to be a productive way to understand what's going on. I'll look more closely at this in subsequent posts.