Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said on Thursday that the Justice Department’s repeated interventions in religious liberty cases prompted him to reopen churches in the state this week.
“The Department of Justice has made very clear to a number of states that peoples’ ability to access church and practice their faith is a constitutional question that they are pushing people at the state level pretty hard on,” Baker told WGBH News. “I couldn’t ignore that.”
Baker, who announced Monday that churches could resume services on Friday, said that asking them to close “was the right thing to do, but I hated doing it.” Churches in Massachusetts had been limited to Baker’s 10-person cap on public gatherings.
The Justice Department has weighed in on three religious liberty cases during the coronavirus pandemic. In the first, Attorney General William Barr threw his support behind a Mississippi church seeking to hold drive-in services. In the second, department officials backed a Virginia church holding in-person services. In the third, the same officials supported a group of California churches that, on May 31, plan to defy Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ban on church services.
In that final instance, officials criticized Newsom for placing “unfair burdens” on churches.
“Simply put, there is no pandemic exception to the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights,” wrote Eric Dreiband, the lead attorney in a team assembled by Barr to examine religious liberty disputes amid state shutdown orders.
