The Supreme Court's Religious Crusaders Take On the Pandemic Response.

'The fight over limits on church attendance divides the justices.

I know I should be jaded by now by the persistence of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in seeking to elevate religious interests over those of secular society. After all, in the closing days of the court’s term, religious employers won the right to withhold from female employees the contraception coverage to which federal law entitled them. Religious schools gained a broad exemption from the anti-discrimination laws that would otherwise protect classroom teachers and soon, no doubt, other employees as well.

But I was still startled last week to see Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas vote to turn a public health issue into a religious crusade. Fortunately for the people of rural Lyon County, Nev., where a church went to federal court for the right to have 90 people at a worship service instead of the permitted 50, the four justices failed to find a fifth vote and the 50-person cap remains.

What surprised me was not that a church would run to federal court with such a case, rather than add a second service or meet outside under a tent. Representing the church, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which used to focus primarily on representing people seeking a religious exemption from having to do business with couples in same-sex marriages. Lately, the alliance has been bringing cases around the country to challenge Covid-19-related limits on in-person church services.

I was mildly surprised that this case got to the Supreme Court; another church case reached the court in May, with a similar outcome. In that case, as in the Nevada case, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to go along with the four dissenters.

What did astonish me was the ferocity of the main dissenting opinion, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. They appear oblivious to the facts on the ground, particularly the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus. (Reflecting the nationwide pattern, a small church in New Haven, Conn., where I live, was identified this month as the likely source of an unexpected uptick in Covid-19 cases.) People who are sitting — and breathing — together for a prolonged period in an enclosed space might as well put out a welcome mat for the coronavirus. We knew that back in May. It is even more evident now. Thus the growing prevalence of official orders limiting people who can come together in that fashion to a certain number or a certain percentage of the venue’s capacity. . .

Why does any of this matter? After all, Justice Alito’s opinion attracted only two other votes. (Justice Gorsuch filed a separate one-paragraph dissent, pithily observing that “there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”)

I think it matters because rhetoric like Justice Alito’s, by design or not, inevitably places the Supreme Court where it least belongs and where it is least qualified to be, at the center of a national debate over how best to protect the American public from a deadly pandemic. It’s beyond dispute that public health has become politicized to a degree that would have been unimaginable just six months ago. Does the court really want to become a part of that politicization by opening its doors to a battle not its own? That even a minority of justices would seize this moment to advance their religious agenda, especially given that agenda’s nearly unqualified success in recent years, is deeply unsettling.

(I’ve been fascinated that some liberal commentators found the dissenting opinions persuasive and the case a close one. I understand the impulse not to appear unduly antagonistic toward religion, but I think that generosity toward the religious claim here loses sight of the broader context in which the dissenting justices were writing.)'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/supreme-court-religion-coronavirus.html?