“It is time – past time – to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court this week.
Limits on the number of people of faith allowed at worship services contradict the First Amendment. David Leaming/Morning Sentinel, File
The very first sentence in the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Throughout this pandemic, I have been confounded by the idea that hundreds and thousands can gather in the streets and protest, hundreds can shop in Walmart and Lowe’s, but people of faith would initially see their churches completely shut down and later have numerical and spatial limits on their exercise of religion.
Lest anyone think Wednesday’s ruling was conservative, I would remind your readers that Justice William O. Douglas understood the words “no law” to mean no law.
Mary Ann Lynch
Cape Elizabeth
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