Prohibiting Religious Services Makes the First Amendment a Coronavirus Victim

A Massachusetts pastor, Kristopher Casey, will be punished with a $300 civil fine for convening more than 10 people at his Sunday church service. If he does it again, the fine will increase to $500, and he could face criminal charges, Masslive.com reports.

And where has the press been in the face of what seems, on its face, to be an egregious violation of the First Amendment's protections of peaceable assembly and the free exercise of religion? The newspapers have been basically cheering it on.

"The constitutional guarantee of civil liberties is not absolute, and its abridgment is not necessarily an act of tyranny," a Washington Post editorial advised. "In this pandemic, the reach of an individual's freedom to be foolish ends an inch away, where the next individual is entitled to protection against the peril posed by the fool's heedlessness." The Post insists that "the same rationale" that closed "concert halls, sports arenas, restaurants, and gyms," also "justifies and requires closing the doors to churches, synagogues, mosques, and other traditional venues of worship."

A New York Times editorial took a similar position: "Bans like these are legal, as long as they are neutral and applicable to everyone…. Under Supreme Court precedent, any infringement on speech or religion must be incidental to the central goal of the restriction, which in this case is clear: stopping the spread of the coronavirus."
If state, local, or federal authorities were shutting down newspaper printing plants, restricting reporters from newsgathering, or preventing the physical distribution of newspapers on pandemic-related public health grounds, the Times and the Post would almost certainly take a different, and less casual, view of the matter. They'd be in court complaining about First Amendment violations faster than you can say Floyd Abrams.