The Supreme Court ruled that California churches can open indoors at 25% capacity.
The Friday decision was a response to lawsuits filed by South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista and Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena after they had been unable to hold indoor services.
California has a tiered coronavirus restrictions program. Regions under the severest restrictions, which included the vast majority of the state since November 2020, have not been able to hold indoor worship services.
Per the ruling, which entailed several splintering opinions, the most restricted regions will be able to hold services indoors at 25% capacity, but singing and chanting will still be prohibited.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said they would have blocked all of the restrictions, while Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh said they concluded the churches did not meet their burden in justifying that singing and chanting should not be banned. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it was important to consider a middle-ground approach.
“The state has concluded, for example, that singing indoors poses a heightened risk of transmitting COVID-19,” he wrote. “I see no basis in this record for overriding that aspect of the state public health framework.”
“At the same time,” he added, “the state’s present determination — that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero — appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”
The justices did not go into much detail about their reasoning for selecting 25%, but Gorsuch noted that most retail establishments have been allowed to continue their business at 25% capacity.
Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
“Justices of this court are not scientists,” Kagan wrote. “Nor do we know much about public health policy. Yet today the court displaces the judgments of experts about how to respond to a raging pandemic.”
She added that “this foray into armchair epidemiology cannot end well.”
