Last weekend, activists urged people from across the country to travel to Washington, D.C., for a million-person protest. It was as if the coronavirus pandemic, which we’ve spent the fast few months fighting, had simply disappeared. And in a way it had, because the rules and regulations passed down to us by government officials and all-knowing health experts were all but nonexistent at Saturday’s march. Many protesters wore masks, but many others didn’t. And in terms of social distancing — well, it’s a bit hard to maintain 6 feet of distance in a crowd of 200,000 people.
But the coronavirus has not disappeared, and the rules governing our response to it are still being applied to businesses, schools, churches, and other organizations. In Maryland, for example, outdoor religious services have been banned completely by Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, as my colleague Tim Carney reported. And my church in northern Virginia has decided to hold off on in-person services, outdoors or indoors, because the regulations are too vague and too difficult to navigate. Where were these regulations during Saturday’s protest?
This is a serious inconsistency that needs to be addressed. Why should the right to worship be treated any differently than the right to assemble? Aren’t these both constitutional rights that the government has sworn to protect?
These are important legal and moral questions, and I’m glad Sen. Josh Hawley is asking them. In a letter to Attorney General William Barr this week, Hawley asked the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation to determine whether “state officials have violated the free speech and free exercise rights of religious Americans by treating religious gatherings and speeches differently than the speech and mass gatherings of protests.”
Government officials cannot selectively restrict constitutional rights. Either the law applies to everyone, or it doesn’t apply at all. In other words, if protesters have the right to gather, churches should have that right as well. Any other application of the law is hypocritical and unconstitutional.
