The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a temporary injunction to a Colorado church seeking relief from Gov. Jared Polis’s gathering restrictions.
The court in a 6-3 decision referred both parties to a November New York case, Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, where it granted Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues relief from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s orders, which it found to violate the First Amendment. The court vacated a lower court’s decision against the evangelical church, High Plains Harvest, and asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the case in light of the New York case.
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, pointing to the fact that Colorado had preemptively lifted its church limitations once the High Plains Harvest appealed to the high court.
“The state has explained that it took that action in response to this court’s recent decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo,” Kagan wrote. “Absent our issuing different guidance, there is no reason to think Colorado will reverse course — and so no reason to think Harvest Church will again face capacity limits.”
Quoting a previous decision, Kagan added that when the “subsequent events” of the coronavirus pandemic cannot “reasonably be expected to recur,” then the case will be “well and truly over.”
High Plains Harvest brought the case after the New York houses of worship, as well as a California evangelical church, successfully obtained injunctions from the court. The New York decision, in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the decisive vote in her first major case since her Senate confirmation, paved the way for the other favorable nods from the court.
Barrett’s addition to the court marks a major change in the way it views religious liberty during the pandemic. Over the summer, the court ruled against two churches in California and Nevada seeking injunctions against gathering restrictions. In both cases, Chief Justice John Roberts cast a swing vote against the churches.
At the time, Roberts emphasized that his refusal to grant injunctions did not reflect his views on the merits of the cases but rather on his belief that the always changing terms of pandemic restrictions made it unwise to issue injunctions in any cases.
