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On Friday night, about nine hours after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant an injunction allowing in-home prayer meetings, the Supreme Court stepped in, suspending Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-Calif.) COVID-19 restriction. While California changed the restrictions shortly after the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit, they would have remained in place until April 15.
“Applicants are likely to succeed on the merits of their free exercise claim; they are irreparably harmed by the loss of free exercise rights ‘for even minimal periods of time’; andthe State has not shown that ‘public health would be imperiled’ by employing less restrictive measures,” the Supreme Court ruled. “Accordingly, applicants are entitled to an injunction pending appeal.”
This marked the fifth time the Court “has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of California’s COVID restrictions on religious exercise,” the Court noted. “California’s Blueprint System contains myriad exceptions and accommodations for comparable activities, thus requiring the application of strict scrutiny.”
While the Court issued an unsigned “Per Curiam” decision, four justices dissented: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer. Roberts said he would not grant the injunction, while Kagan wrote a dissent, with which Sotomayor and Breyer joined. In other words, former President Donald Trump’s conservative Supreme Court majority saved these in-home gatherings from the leftist justices, along with Roberts.
The Court ruled that “the Ninth Circuit’s failure to grant an injunction pending appeal was erroneous.” The justices went on to lay out four key points on religious freedom.
“First, government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause, whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise,” the Court argued, citing Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020).
“Second, whether two activities are comparable for purposes of the Free Exercise Clause must be judged against the asserted government interest that justifies the regulation at issue,” the Court added. “Comparability is concerned with the risks various activities pose, not the reasons why people gather.”
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“Third, the government has the burden to establish that the challenged law satisfies strict scrutiny. To do so in this context, it must do more than assert that certain risk factors ‘are always present in worship, or always absent from the other secular activities’ the government may allow,” the Court ruled. “Instead, narrow tailoring requires the government to show that measures less restrictive of the First Amendment activity could not address its interest in reducing the spread of COVID.”
Finally, “even if the government withdraws or modifies a COVID restriction in the course of litigation, that does not necessarily moot the case. And so long as a case is not moot, litigants otherwise entitled to emergency injunctive relief remain entitled to such relief where the applicants ‘remain under a constant threat’ that government officials will use their power to reinstate the challenged restrictions.”
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They’re Trying to Shut Us Down
Over the last several months, I’ve lost count of how many times the powers-that-be have tried to shut us down. They’ve sent hackers at us, forcing us to take extreme measures on web security. They sent attorneys after us, but thankfully we’re not easily intimidated by baseless accusations or threats. They’ve even gone so far as to make physical threats. Those can actually be a bit worrisome but Remington has me covered.
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Thank you and God bless!
JD Rucker