A 5-4 Supreme Court ruling has rejected a request from a California church to block limitations on the number of people who could attend religious services during the coronavirus pandemic.
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the leftists and wrote separately to explain his vote.
“Although California’s guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Roberts wrote.
“Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.”
Pot shops, abortion clinics, and liquor stores are essential, but churches are not.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh would have granted the church’s request.
Kavanaugh, writing for Thomas and Gorsuch, said the church would suffer “irreparable harm from not being able to hold services on Pentecost Sunday in a way that comparable secular businesses and persons can conduct their activities.”
A better case might be one that challenges draconian rules about religious gatherings.
The state is supreme. Currently, they can tell you how to worship.
Don’t worry, you can still riot and destroy black businesses or vandalize major news corporation buildings.
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Roberts compares secular gatherings to religious ones, missing the whole point of Freedom of Religion, and freedom from government regulating religion. Are mosques and Hindu Temples also to be under the same authoritarian mandate? Will this judgement now be used in ANY “emergency” to limit worship?
He is no conservative nor does he respect the worship of God
This will not stand… SCOTUS will re-visit this down the road. Robert’s has declared himself to be a fool incapable of common sense.
So we are that this close to losing all our freedoms because of a government sponsored pandemic?
So all we apparently need here in the good old USA is a pandemic to lose all of our rights?