Quote:

“Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area. But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten. The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.”

Key Ruling: New York's closing of places of worship violated the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion, particularly as secular businesses in the same areas remain open.

Background:

This case, decided November 25, 2020, is still a relative unknown, which speaks to the power that mainstream media and Big Tech wield to suppress American's knowledge their Constitutional rights. However, it is one of the most recent and killer decisions in the fight against authoritarian Marxists. It's fall, ironically, also tracks neatly with the decline of once-idolized but now-removed Governor Andrew Cuomo.

In 2020, then Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order sorting neighborhoods into “clusters” which were allegedly based on COVID-19 cases and restricted activities within these New York around each “cluster”. The immediate area around a cluster was classified as a “red” zone, where attendance at worship services is limited to 10 people. The concentric area around a red zone was an “orange” zone, where attendance at worship services there is limited to 25 people. And the area around an orange zone was a “yellow” zone, where attendance was limited to 50% of maximum capacity. In contrast, certain secular businesses deemed “essential” were permitted to remain open in all of these zones, subject to different restrictions.

Objecting to the disparate treatment of religious vs secular organizations, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn teamed up with two Orthodox Jewish synagogues to sue Cuomo and block enforcement of this executive order, citing violation of the First Amendment free exercise clause.

The Court held that the places of worship were entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were likely to prevail on their First Amendment claims and that denial of relief would lead to irreparable injury while granting relief did absolutely nothing to harm the public interest. Therefore, the petitioners were entitled to relief, in the form of an injunction, to stop Cuomo's unconstitutional executive order.

First, the Supreme Court found that the Petitioners had made a “strong” showing that Cuomo's challenged restrictions violated a “minimum requirement of neutrality” by specifically calling out and targeting religious institutions for restrictions while allowing secular (non-religious) businesses to be categorized as “essential” with no justification as to why they were essential. Second, the Court held that “the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” Third and lastly, the Court held that the government could not show that the requested relief would harm the public, as it had absolutely NO PROOF that attendance at the applicants services resulted in the spread of disease. Thus, it was clear to the Court that Cuomo's executive order must be stopped with a temporary injunction.

Several justices offered concurring opinions, as well as dissents. Justice Gorsuch argued there is a troubling pattern of state governments using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to discriminate against religious activities more than the secular. He noted that this is just one example of such open religious discrimination. Justice Kavanaugh pointed out the importance of an immediate injunction in his concurrence, rather than waiting for trial as Chief Justice Roberts desired.

Meanwhile Chief Justice Roberts joined the liberals in dissenting, arguging in his dissent that Cuomo had already changed designations for the affected areas. The remaining liberal justices argued that courts needed to give elected officials broad discretion to trample on constitutional rights in times of “uncertain and rapidly changing medical and scientific information.”

While the dissents set the tone for a dystopia where politicians are granted unlimited authority in any scenario where there is “uncertain and rapidly changing” scientific or medical information, they were thankfully in the minority. The majority correctly revealed the authoritarian Marxist Wizard behind the curtain, showing that the real use of restrictions like this has been to discriminate against the religious while holding businesses they favored (and likely were connected to) to continue to operate business as normal (or largely as normal). This sets the tone not just for the challenge of economic restrictions but potentially for challenges to the vaccine mandates which have rolled out recently under Biden.