San Diego South Bay United Pentecostal Church seeks emergency relief from U.S. Supreme Court
(The Center Square) – The Thomas More Society has filed a second emergency request for relief with the U.S. Supreme Court from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on houses of worship on behalf of South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges III.
Justice Elena Kagan, who oversees the Ninth Circuit, will initially decide on the matter. The governor has until 5 p.m. eastern on Friday to reply.
The Emergency Application for Writ of Injunction Relief was requested before Sunday, Janu. 31, when the church plans to hold indoor services at its location in Chula Vista.
Despite the governor claiming to lift the state’s regional stay-at-home order first imposed last March, the order still prohibits indoor worship and singing among congregants of religious organizations and houses of worship.
Thomas More Society Special Counsel Charles LiMandri argues that Newsom allowing hair and nail salons to reopen providing services indoors, and specifically preventing houses of worship from holding indoor services violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“The governor’s ill treatment of houses of worship is indefensible,” LiMandri said in a statement. “To deny churches to hold indoor worship – even socially distanced – while allowing services that permit close personal contact and repeated touch, with client and provider separated by mere inches – is nothing short of hypocritical and discriminatory.”
Other cases pending before the Supreme Court or brought against Newsom point to the Supreme Court’s Thanksgiving Eve ruling in Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a case won by the Thomas More Society, in which the court granted relief to New York’s Roman Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues.
In his opinion in the New York case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that it was time to dispel the “misconceptions about the role of the Constitution in times of crisis, which have already been permitted to persist for too long. It is time – past time – to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.”
South Bay United Pentecostal Church, among others, have asked the high court and lower courts to grant them the same relief.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that an ‘emergency does not increase granted power,’ however, the coronavirus pandemic has been used to justify the broad overreach of the police power of the state with regard to religious expression, effectively removing our cherished freedom of worship as a ‘first class right,’” LiMandri added. “We cannot afford to let tyranny against religion rise in the guise of well-meaning governmental ‘protections.’”
In addition to Newsom, the plaintiffs sued California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Acting California Public Health Officer Sandra Shewry, San Diego County Director of Emergency Services Helen Robbins-Meyer, San Diego County Public Health Officer Wilma J. Wooten, and San Diego County Sherriff William Gore, int their official capacities.
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