Her dissent pointed to numerous concerns in the high court’s ruling that allows churches to resume services at limited capacities.
On Friday, a Supreme Court ruling lifted some restrictions that banned indoor worship services in California as the coronavirus pandemic continues. However, Associate Justice Elena Kagan penned a dissent that criticized the 6-3 decision. The ban was lifted on indoor services for California’s Tier 1 counties—those with widespread COVID-19 risks. Despite religious establishments being able to hold worship services during the pandemic, some restrictions are still in place, such as 25 percent capacity limits or bans on singing and chanting. In a July 2020 Statewide Public Health Officer Order, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) had said that places of worship, as well as gyms, protests, salons and more, would need to halt indoor operations if counties appeared on the CDPH’s County Monitoring List for three days in a row. In her opinion, Kagan—one of the three liberal justices on the bench, including Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, who dissented—raised pandemic concerns, while criticizing some of the justices’ arguments. “Justices of this Court are not scientists. Nor do we know much about public health policy. Yet today the Court displaces the judgments of experts about how to respond to a raging pandemic,” she wrote. Kagan continues to say that California’s policies “treat worship just as favorably as secular activities,” which have the same risk of transmitting coronavirus. “Under the Court’s injunction, the State must instead treat worship services like secular activities that pose a much lesser danger,” she wrote, saying that the mandate “risks worsening the pandemic.
