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4  SOUTH BAY UNITED PENTECOSTAL CHURCH v. NEWSOM 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

tion  plans  subject  to  enforcement  by  State  labor  authori-
ties.”  Id., ¶121.  Film production studios in California, for 
example, must test their employees as many as three times 
a week—a requirement that “could not feasibly be applied 
to the congregation of a house of worship.”  Ibid., and n. 8. 
  Given  all  that  evidence,  California’s  choices  make  good 
sense.  The State is desperately trying to slow the spread of 
a deadly disease.  It has concluded, based on essentially un-
disputed  epidemiological  findings,  that  congregating  to-
gether indoors poses a special threat of contagion.  So it has 
devised regulations to curb attendance at those assemblies 
and—in  the  worst  times—to  force  them  outdoors.    Cru-
cially,  California  has  applied  each  of  those  rules  equiva-
lently to religious activities and to secular activities, includ-
ing  some  with  First  Amendment  protection  of  their  own.  
Where the State has regulated religious conduct, it has as 
well  regulated  “nonreligious  conduct  that  endangers  [its] 
interests in a similar” way.  Lukumi, 508 U. S., at 543.  The 
only secular conduct the State treats better is the kind that 
its experts have found does not so imperil its interests—the 
kind that poses less risk of COVID transmission.  Nothing 
in that policy violates the First Amendment. 
  Yet  the  Court  will  not  let  California  fight  COVID  as  it 
thinks appropriate.  The Court has decided that the State 
must exempt worship services from the strictest aspect of 
its regulation of public gatherings.  No one can know, from 
the Court’s 19-line order, exactly why: Is it that the Court 
does not believe the science, or does it think even the best 
science  must  give  way?    In  any  event,  the  result  is  clear: 
The  State  may  not  treat  worship  services  like  activities 
found to  pose a  comparable  COVID risk,  such as  political 
meetings or lectures.  Instead, the State must treat this one 
communal gathering like activities thought to pose a much 
lesser  COVID  risk,  such  as  running  in  and  out  of  a  hard-
ware store.  In thus ordering the State to change its public