The Constitution Has No "Pandemic Emergency" Exception

In a piece today at the  American Thinker, Jeffrey Folks explains Why It Matters When New York's Governor Spits on SCOTUS Defense of Religious Freedom. Spoiler alert: It matters that religions liberty is the first of the things listed in the First Amendment with which government is forbidden from interfering.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, Gov. Cuomo of New York and other governors have tried to shut down or limit attendance at America's churches. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that Cuomo's COVID response, which limited church attendance to as few as ten or lower, violates the constitutional right to freedom of religion. It may be that the ruling has broad applicability to religious services throughout New York, as well as to those in California and all other states.

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Religious liberty is at the heart of our national identity. For a top liberal opinion-maker to say defending it is just "politics" is horrifying.

Note that this lawsuit was brought by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, a large and substantial group in New York, not by, say, the Jewish community. But the Jewish community, the Sikhs, the Muslims, indeed every religious group may benefit from this ruling. On the other hand, one must wonder what the Governor was thinking. After all, those who are most vulnerable surely know it by now. Shouldn't they isolate themselves? Those who are less vulnerable should be able to determine their own risks, shouldn't they? Do we really need a tyrant to tell us what risks we are allowed to take, while forcing us to take other risks that we may not want to take?

Understanding that Cumomo is a Leftist (not, as Folks says in the article, a liberal) helps to understand his attitude:

Only by understanding the nature of liberal bias can one begin to understand liberals' actions and goals. When liberals speak of "separation of church and state" — the false basis of their thinking about religious liberty — what they actually mean is the suppression of churches. Liberals have been conducting a war against Christianity for over 200 years — certainly since Voltaire's Candide (1759) and the time of rationalists like William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham — and their goal is not a polite "separation" of religion from schools and courthouses. It is the elimination of religious expression everywhere.

This goal is particularly obvious as we enter Advent and approach the celebration of Christ's birth. It is not surprising during one of the holiest times of the year that liberals should be especially active in their attempts at suppression. It's not just the prohibition of religious symbols at public schools, as troubling as these prohibitions are. It's the attempt to suppress all idealism and faith in life and to replace them with cynicism and rationalism. That materialist ethos is, after all, the liberal alternative to religious faith.

One of the keys to understanding the liberal mind is to recognize that liberals, often atheists but also those attending universalist churches, assume that other faiths are inferior to their own. No true religion can worship the State in the way that liberals do. What liberals offer is a false faith that competes with Christianity and other true religions.

The liberal mind seeks finality because it cannot deal with the vexing uncertainty of life itself. Better to be equal regardless of merit than for some to stand out; better for the State to rule supreme than for individuals to have to compete in a messy capitalist marketplace. Most importantly, better to settle things — to get over the agonizing insecurity of living even if it means living within a gray, hopeless world.

Please go read the entire article. If the Constitution is to truly protect our rights, and serve as a framework for the working out of difference by means other than warfare, then its provisions must operate in all circumstances. There can not be a "pandemic exception" to the Constitution. Otherwise, government officials would find an excuse to declare an emergency all the time. The realization that this was true was why the North Carolina legislature took away the Governor's ability to declare a weather emergency that took away our right to carry a weapon in public. But the Constitution doesn't recognize a weather emergency either.