In pivotal role, Chief Justice John Roberts lays out what is acceptable for governments.
The Supreme Court’s deeply divided order rejecting an emergency challenge to California’s pandemic-related restrictions on places of worship still provides a guide for lower courts balancing government rules intended to preserve public health with parishioners’ constitutional religious rights.
Just before midnight Friday, the court on a 5-to-4 vote rejected a challenge from South Bay Pentecostal Church near San Diego. The church had argued that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) reopening orders violated the Constitution by placing fewer restrictions on some secular businesses than houses of worship.
In late night ruling, Supreme Court says California can enforce restrictions
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the court’s four consistent liberals to reject the church’s call to stop enforcement of the restrictions.
“California’s guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Roberts wrote in his opinion.
Although Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan did not sign on to Roberts’ opinion, his vote provides the majority.
And in only five paragraphs, Roberts laid out what will likely be the test for courts going forward.
He said they should be deferential to local and state officials who are faced with a historically difficult task of preventing the deadly virus while attempting to reopen sectors of American society that have been shuttered for weeks.
“At this time, there is no known cure, no effective treatment, and no vaccine,” he wrote. “Because people may be infected but asymptomatic, they may unwittingly infect others.”
Protecting public health is a “dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement, but one the Constitution “principally entrusts” to elected officials.
