In what is being called as a blow to the religious right, and a victory for public health and the collective good, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision establishing that states still have some power to regulate how many people are allowed to gather in churches during a deadly pandemic. Roberts sided with the liberal contingency.
Roberts writes in his opinion, “although California’s guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”
That’s because “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.”
It does not violate the Constitution’s religious liberty protections, in other words, to require churches to follow the same rules that apply to similar institutions. And it certainly doesn’t violate those protections to give churches more freedom than similar institutions.
All four of the Court’s most conservative members dissented in South Bay United, and three of those justices joined an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that would make it quite difficult for states to regulate potentially dangerous conduct by religious institutions.
Typical with hierarchy supporters, where their wants are supposed to take precedent over the good of the whole.
