More than 100 million Christians have been asked by their country to make a sacrifice of their own this Easter and stay at home for the most important holiday of the year. It’s a solemn mandate, and one that will likely save tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, so naturally, it’s brought the absolute worst of petty authoritarians and whataboutism across the political spectrum.
Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk and Emerald Robinson of the Bill Gates is “using vaccines to track people” fame have both questioned why churches must close if liquor stores are allowed to stay open.
Why will liquor stores and Marijunia dispensiares be open on Easter while churches are closed?
?
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 11, 2020
If the churches are closed, then the liquor stores & abortion clinics should be closed too. Or they can all be deemed “essential” and stay open.
What’s unacceptable is the current situation: the churches are closed but the abortion clinics & liquor stores remain open.
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) April 6, 2020
The answer, of course, is that, like any grocery store, liquor stores allow contactless delivery through apps like Drizly or Postmates and can easily regulate the number of people within a store and the space between them. The “delivery” form of a church service is the online model plenty have adopted, and to insist on a contactless service in person would be both practically impossible and belie the very community-oriented purpose of most churches.
In short, we’re banning physical congregations within a church for the same reason we’ve done so for things as vital as other sorts of assembly protected under our constitutional rights, because in order to keep our current quarantine as short as possible, it must be extreme. That doesn’t require limiting contactless delivery and easily regulated store capacity. That does require shutting down mass gatherings with no promise of maintaining a minimum of a six-foot perimeter around every person.
And as is mandated by the laws of our offensively unserious times, the pendulum must swing the other way, with overtly bad actors attempting to shut down any religious behavior with the clear intention of contempt for the church as an institution, not for any semblance of care for public health.
Democratic Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer decided to give the lie to his true intentions during the Holy Week, prohibiting not just in-person Easter services, but also the sensibly planned drive-in services of the On Fire Christian Church.
“If we allowed this in Louisville, we’d have hundreds of thousands of people driving around the city Sunday,” Fischer said, ignoring the fact that the coronavirus cannot transcend locked car doors. He then said the city would record every license plate number at the drive-in service, echoing Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s earlier threats about the state.
Luckily, a judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent Fisher’s mandate from going forward. But this is an “all’s well that ends well” situation not just because of the happy ending but what it revealed in the process.
Yes, churches require more regulations than a liquor store or any other kind of store during a highly contagious pandemic, but that won’t stop wannabe fascists from taking advantage of the situation to advance their anti-religious goals. Churches and the faithful may need to sacrifice more for their fellow man in a public health crisis, but don’t let anyone blind you to the bad-faith actors who had it out for them all along.
