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?
The sobamacare savior. He was appointed by Shrubya so he has that going for him which is nice.
Once again, Chief Justice Roberts has demonstrated a penchant for hyper-politicized rulings perversely predicated upon his putative desire to preserve the integrity of the Supreme Court. The most egregious of these rulings was his deciding, fifth vote affirming the constitutionality of Obamacare on June 28, 2012. His California religious restriction ruling affirms his continued commitment to this delusion.
Roberts’ new judicial philosophy reveals a dismissive contempt for the law of the land (aka the Constitution of the United States of America). It can be fairly summarized as follows: “Constitutional authority? The [federal/state] government don’t need no stinking constitutional authority. ‘WE SAY SO!’ is all the authority it needs to violate every citizen’s God-given rights, specifically including our rights to pursue our own happiness, to make our own life-and-death healthcare choices, and to practice our chosen religion free from coercive government control.
Only the willfully blind or the comatose can deny that the Constitution barely has a pulse in post-modern, post-rational, post-vertebral America. In truth, it survives only in the fading memory of liberty-loving citizens. What remains of the scandalously-desecrated original has been fundamentally transformed from a security pact among the sovereign states and their citizens into an instrument of surrender to an unconstrained federal government. John Adams’ ideal of “a government of laws, not of men” has been turned upside down.
The perpetrators of this high crime consist of a cabal of lifetime-tenured attorneys–like John Roberts–masquerading as impartial judges; of armies of unaccountable, social-engineering bureaucrats; and of self-serving, career politicians from both major parties. By their actions, these outlaws have rendered null and void the SOLE source of their “just powers”–the written and ratified Constitution, NOT the fake, “living” document conjured by progressives, statists and collectivists. In doing so, they have forfeited their legitimate authority over we the people of the United States.
So, what’s the bottom line of all this sound and fury? What should law-abiding citizens do when their governments seek to force them back into the shackles which our ancestors escaped by winning their independence nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago? As I see it, only a non-violent, non-partisan, grassroots movement of citizen CEOs (Constitution Enforcement Officers) dedicated to forcing our wannabe political masters back within their original, strict constitutional constraints can ensure America’s survival for future generations as–in the words of Ronald Reagan–“a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”