It’s fitting that 2020 would end with a federal court finally siding with religious institutions over New York’s arbitrary and restrictive COVID-19 regulations, put in place by left-wing politicians. New York City’s bevy of ignorant elected officials has been showing their anti-religious bigotry for months without consequence.
On Monday, the Second Circuit in Manhattan sided with Orthodox Jewish communities and a Catholic diocese striking down New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 executive orders that limited seating capacities at houses of worship. The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously said Cuomo’s arbitrary restrictions “discriminates against religion on its face.” The groups sued Cuomo over the restrictions back in October.
“The restrictions challenged here specially and disproportionately burden religious exercise,” and violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, Circuit Judge Michael Park wrote in the ruling.
Becket, who represented the groups, tweeted, “This effectively means that New York cannot enforce its caps against *any* house of worship.” Before Thanksgiving, the Supreme Court ruled on this case, granting injunctive relief while the appeals were pending.
For most of the year, government officials have either been frozen in fear, reacted overzealously in response to the virus, or, as time went on, let their anti-religious bigotry show.
The double standard seemed obvious to everyone but those in power. In Nevada you could go to a casino but not church. In California you could go shopping but not to a house of worship. In New York City, you could eat outside in some areas but you couldn’t attend synagogue because it was located in a “cluster” that happened to be the exact location of a community of devoutly religious Jews.
For months we saw a battle between religious liberty and civic responsibility like we haven’t witnessed in some time: Which one must we sacrifice for the other, if only temporarily? Churches and synagogues relented at first, unwilling to put people needlessly at risk. But as more restrictions were put in place, religious liberty advocates alerted the public, elected officials, and the media, via lawsuits and more, to the growing breaches of First Amendment freedoms.
These advocates were often mocked, ignored, or told they didn’t care about loss of life or that they somehow valued their “freedom to worship” over the lives of those who might contract COVID-19 and die. This was not the case — there was something greater at stake than even life, for life without liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the ability to worship or speak freely, isn’t the American way of living at all.
In an opinion on this very topic, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” This is true. Freedom, and particularly the freedoms enjoyed under the First Amendment, are always at risk of being stamped out. It has been that way since the dawn of the country, and it will always be this way. Sure, the risk fluctuates and the enemy changes; they’re God-given natural rights, but they’re never fully secure. The Constitution should not be put away, but sometimes it still must be fought for, if only in the battlefield that looks more like the court of law and against an enemy that looks more like a virus, or authoritarian politicians, than enemy troops.
This year, and for the time being, it looks like freedom won.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
