Well, That Didn’t Take Long
By: Mitchell Freedman
Tags: Supreme Court, Politics, Church Vs State, Covid

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Here I was, still relaxing after Thanksgiving and thinking — at least in one little corner of my mind — that the days when I would have an easy target to pick on were soon ending.

I started blogging because I thought that some of the stories being covered or talked about in newspapers and on television — and blogs, and pop-up news feeds and facebook and twitter and all the rest — weren’t telling the whole story.

That clearly didn’t last too long. I got Trumped.

So, as the clock ticks down, I thought I could get back to where I started, seeing how all those media platforms cover things like the economy and science, religion and sports. Maybe even culture or agriculture or population demographics. After all, who knows what the future will bring?

Forget it. I think I will have a new target to pick on, a whole new source of troubling actions that will linger over our society like a dark cloud, leaving a trail of wreckage in its path.

Yes. The Supreme Court.

There are three new Trump-appointed judges on that court, which has always said courts don’t make any new laws, they just interpret what people can legally do as defined in the Constitution.

No politics here. Except for that one judge who got mad when President Obama dared criticize him publicly and refused to go to his swearing in for a second term. Forget decades of tradition. Hissy-fit is the new norm.

Now why am I going a little crazy about this, especially when President Biden hasn’t even taken office yet?

Well, it was that recent court decision being celebrated by a lot of Orthodox Jews and leaders of the Catholic Church — the one that said New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, was wrong, wrong, wrong, in imposing really strict limits on how many people could go to houses of worship in areas which had become coronavirus hot zones.

Now if you don’t live in New York, you may not know that some religious groups — particularly some Orthodox Jews — have been proudly and publicly defying limits on public gatherings, and showing as much contempt for wearing masks as motorcycle riders at the Sturgis rally. Some church groups were doing the same thing. For example, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn went to court seeking an injunction against the ban.

Now, right up front I have to admit I though the restriction — limiting church attendance (I just don’t want to have to type church and state every time it comes up, just assume those six little letters — church — stand for church and temple, synagogue and mosque, Christian Science reading room and a whole batch of other things) — was too harsh.

After all, there was no consideration of how big the church was. You could put 20 people in a storefront house of worship and be crowded, 500 in some of the biggest ones had have two out of three seats still empty.

It’s a really complex issue. After all, when you are in church, you pray. Out loud. You normally sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers for an hour or so, all breathing in and out in what is usually an older building which does not have a lot of air exchanges per hour.

But, the ban wasn’t sophisticated. It just set a limit. Of course, coronavirus cases were going up sharply in those hot zones, and people flouting regulations about things like social distancing and mask wearing were leading to things like hospital overcrowding and lord knows what else.

So, the Supreme Court ruled that the Governor’s ban was unconstitutional. The 5–4 decision simply said the Governor had overreached. He was found guilty of ignoring constitutionally protected religious freedoms which clashed with public health concerns.

Why am I upset? After all, a lot of priests and rabbis (and all the other religious leaders) thought it was a good and important thing to do, to curb the ever-growing influence of secular government over religious freedom.

Heck, you have probably seen the plot on television lots of times. A criminal confesses to a priest, and a wrong man is put in jail. What can the priest do? The confessional is sacred.

Now I used to argue stuff like this with Jesuit-schooled friends when I was younger, but we where just having fun. Now, however, the Supreme Court has put the whole issue front and center.

The question is where do you draw the line. Lots of people want to gather in a building and worship as they choose. Free to do it? Good. Lots of people want to gather outdoors for a religious ceremony. Free to do it? Good.

Lots of people want to go to church on Sunday and there is no place to park. Some of them park by a “no parking” sign and get a ticket. Their lawyer says the city or town is keeping them from worshiping. Tear it up? Good.

A church is having a 30-day worship ceremony. Or the mosque is having a 30-day observance, or the temple is having an eight-day service at the end of the year, or someone wants to go to mass all through Lent. Tear up all those parking tickets too?

If you think that’s all too ridiculous to actually happen, I spent a couple of years doing stories about a temple in Westhampton Beach that wanted to erect an Eruv — a symbolic piece of string on telephone polls. It would — define an area where they could do things otherwise banned by their religion as working on God’s declared day of rest — things like wheeling a baby carriage to services. I also covered arguments in Southampton Village on whether a religious group could worship in a building that did not have adequate parking.

I can hardly wait until the Supreme Court gets to decide what groups can claim to be a recognized religion. After all, what if some anti-Trump demonstrators were to demand next week that police can’t interfere with their right to worship right there in the street. Or on the beach. Or in front of the White House. With their sacred protest signs.

All of the country’s motorcycle riders could form their own religion, and make gathering in Sturgis once a year as a holy pilgrimage. Hey, what could go wrong?

Well, in Minnesota, they identified 51 people who came down with coronavirus from the Sturgis rally and 35 more who got the disease from them. Four were hospitalized, one died. It led to a month-long shutdown of bars.

You know, I know some people who use wine as part of a religious service. Some of them think their church is wherever they pray.

Set ’em up, Joe. First drink is on the Supreme Court.