The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Four: SCOTUS says religious groups can spread COVID

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Four: SCOTUS says religious groups can spread COVID

I have several items I want to run through, with just maybe two or three minutes on most of them.

We start with the fact that the last week of November, the rightwing gained its first Bugs Bunny Barrett-driven victory at the Supreme Court, ruling 5-4 in favor of two religious organizations challenging New York state orders limiting the number of people attending their religious services due to the risk of spreading COVID.

The majority ruled in favor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, agreeing that the restrictions violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment on the grounds that the regulations treated the houses of worship more harshly than comparable secular facilities - "comparable," in the eyes of the Court, meaning a religious service with at least scores and in one notable case, a couple of thousand often maskless people in an enclosed space for an extended time is essentially the same as a commercial establishment featuring often masked customers coming and going with few remaining for an extended time and not packed together.

The details of the state regulations and the justices' opinions are largely irrelevant in the fact of two things that stand out:

One is that the case should have been dismissed as moot because the state had already significantly modified the orders at issue. It wasn't, on the grounds that the groups "remain under a constant threat" because the restrictions could always be reinstated, a "it can always come up again" standard under which a great many cases dismissed as moot should not have been. It wasn't found moot because the reactionary majority wanted to rule on it, wanted to smack down public health rules because of their ideology of pushing religion into the law.

New York Governor Andrew "I'll never be my dad" Cuomo said the Court didn't find the case to be moot because the majority wanted to make a statement that this is now a different Supreme Court. Which is a different way of saying the same thing: This was about ideology, not the law or the Constitution.

The other notable point is that the decision was scientifically illiterate. Not only because of the idiocy of the "comparable facility" claim but because at bottom it relies on the conviction that what happens in a congregation because of the failure to respect public health guidelines affects no one outside that community. That even if you want to bizarrely say that religious freedom means we have to allow for the spread of an infectious disease within a religious community, you still have to say that those people are incapable of spreading that disease outside it. Which is transparent nonsense to a degree that just stating it is sufficient refutation.

Perhaps dimly aware of that, the majority said "there are many other less restrictive rules that could be adopted" but failed to suggest any that are both enforceable and equally effective - actually, they failed to suggest any at all, turning unsupported speculation into fact, which I suppose is pretty run of the mill for the right wing.

The bottom line is that the result of this decision is that being a religious organization entitles you to risk the public health. As Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University said of the decision, people will die as a result.