Questions asked by Danville Christian Academy and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, quoted at "Christian school in Kentucky asks justices to intervene in dispute over in-person classes at religious schools" (SCOTUSblog).
Cameron is a Republican. He's joined the school's lawsuit challenging the COVID order put in place by Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat. The school won at the district court level. Beshear won in the 6th Circuit, which said it was enough that the Governor's order treated all schools alike.
ADDED: To avoid violating the Free Exercise clause, it's important — in crafting a government policy — not to draw a line between religion and nonreligion. Beshear got that part right. But if Governors are unusually hesitant to open public schools, does that justify holding back private schools? Should religious private schools have a special privilege to extricate themselves from the Governor's order that is not available to nonreligious private schools?
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47 comments:
It’s not hard to craft rules that make sense and treat similar situations similarly. The hard part is not favouring the activities that are important to the people making the rules. Power corrupts, and all that.
With great political power
comes zero responsibility
to those outside your base
Ivor Cummins explains Sweden's experience with COVID-19
A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19
That article includes this table.
The article explains that table as follows:
[quote; emphasis added]
.... the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19. This suggests ... that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. ... deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be recategorized as being due to COVID-19.
The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.
All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary ...
[end quote]
The virus is a Chinese bioweapon that I have always believe was deliberately released.
The CCP suppresses religion in China for the obvious reasons.
They’ve successfully exported their suppression of religion to the U.S. with their eager allies, the Democrats.
Talk about your pre-existing conditions.
At every step along the way over the past 8 months, the virus panic has instituted long desired policy objectives of the CCP and the Democratic Party... by fiat... that they were unable to institute thru legislation.
This doesn’t look incidental or accidental to me.
o Mail-in ballots
o Masks that effectively prevent public discussion
o Drastic prohibitions on public assembly
o Increased surveillance of citizens
o Denunciation of citizens to authorities
o Destruction of small business in favor of huge corporations
o Suppression of religion
o Suppression of singing in public
You’re right, Ann. Employment Division v Smith needs to be overturned. It’s bad law.
I think we should all bone up on our definition of “voluntary activity”, and also the legal principle of assumption of risk. That will help sort out the root causes of some of this finger-pointing and shaming.
Apparently talking and singing are bad things in crowds. Return to written church services.
Note-passing should be encouraged in schools.
Or they could just follow SCIENCE!, read the data, and understand that kids in school are not getting sick. They are not dying from Covid. And they are not spreading the disease to the teachers. But they are suffering from isolation, getting dumbed down from trying to follow, part-time, online classes taught by people who are mostly not adept at teaching online (let alone in person). The kids are becoming more, not less, socially inept. More, not less, depressed. More, not less, behind the rest of the world in education.
We are grooming a generation to be able to do nothing but buy goods made elsewhere, type into their phones, and watch Netflix.
Open the damned schools. Stop with the nonsense. And while we're at it, allow businesses to open and allow adults do decide how much risk they are willing to take in their lives. Life is dangerous. Life has risks. The history of the world has not changed because we have Netflix. Or Covid-Wuhan. We're changing it as a social experiment.
Mike Sylwester said...
[Quotes from Johns Hopkins student-run newsletter]
This is interesting stuff, and this link has shown up in lots of feeds this week. But it still doesn't change the fact that the US total death rate spiked to 36.1% - 41.2% above normal in the week of April 11, 2020, and has remained in "excess deaths" territory ever since. For the latest data point of the week ended Nov. 14, deaths were 2% - 6% high, a lot better than it was earlier in the year. In total they show about 300k excess deaths during 2020, which is more than the official count of Covid deaths, not less. See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
So an unusually high number of people have died this year in the US, whether due to Covid or something else. It's hard to imagine that Covid isn't playing a big role in that result.
Ann:
Although I haven’t read the decisions, it’s not completely a Free Exercise case. It’s more of a case involving Equal Protection and abuse of police powers exercised in an arbitrary and capricious fashion.
You can’t allow big crowds at basketball games but restrict school class size. Totally irrational.
The issue to me, comes down to the government's power to declare "essential". Kohls is, Kens Shoes, is not. Kohls lets in 100 customers, Kens would comply with a limit of 6 customers, but an arbitrary governor, locked Ken's up tight. Why? "Essential."
So the issue is whether worship is "essential". The people thought faith so essential, they demanded restrictions on Govt power to regulate worship. The people have declared Observance of Faith "essential"
Private schools are protected twice in the first Amendment. Freedom to Assemble and Free Exercise. A private school is a group of people coming together to share their ideas. If the government wants to restrict their schools, then that's their issue. Should it be against the law for private schools to be open when public schools are closed? Should it be against the law that a church be open when a City Hall is closed? If these statements are yes, then it would be against the law to have any Sunday session of school or church. And don't tell me about special case, because I'm pretty sure there are statutes that require public schools and City Halls to be closed on Sunday.
I prefer Brashear's sentiments expressed in the original Italian.
"Tutto all'interno dello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, niente contro lo Stato." - Benito Mussolini
More poetic that way.
As a church musician who’s played for four denominations, I’d guess that close to 100% of clergy in the Hudson Valley are Democrats.
They cannot see, nor believe what the Democratic Party is doing to their churches.
They’ve been obsessed with the battle against the phantom bigots for 60 years and that is their only frame of political reference.
@Obadiah: “This is interesting stuff, and this link has shown up in lots of feeds this week. But it still doesn't change the fact that the US total death rate spiked to 36.1% - 41.2% above normal in the week of April 11, 2020, and has remained in "excess deaths" territory ever since. For the latest data point of the week ended Nov. 14, deaths were 2% - 6% high, a lot better than it was earlier in the year.”
Granted, 40-ish percent sure looks like C-19 was the cause.
But 2% - 6% seems within the range of annual variation.
6th Cir. still controlled by the Dems.
Shouldn't the standard be that similar activities/risks are treated the same? Why should the private schools have to do what public schools are doing when other private businesses of similar capacity are open?
“Should religious private schools have a special privilege to extricate themselves from the Governor's order that is not available to nonreligious private schools?”
“Special privilege” is a loaded, inaccurate term. “Special protection” is more appropriate. Are nonreligious private schools engaged in the “free exercise” of religion and therefore protected by the First Amendment? No. Seems pretty straightforward but for the predilections of leftist judges and other anti-Constitutional lefties.
Most religious schools promise the students and their parents “a classic Christian education,” an obvious example of “free exercise.” When did First Amendment protection become a “special privilege? Is that part of the Democrats “transformation” of our nation?
Our indoor pool just got shut down due to the fact news panic over the common Covid cold. Now I'm going to have to travel to my daughters house on the north shore a couple days a week for some ocean swimming. Life's a Beach.
It should be noted that the city of Racine is enforcing its order for all school buildings to remain closed, including private schools in the city, until mid January.
“The City of Racine is still banning schools from having students and teachers in their buildings within city limits through Jan. 15, despite a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision last week that put the local order closing schools on pause.“
You want to switch schools so your kids can get an education? Tough shit serf.. OBEY
TheSSC is going to rule on a similar order for all grades 3-12 in Dane County.
It's Kentucky. College basketball is THE religion of the state.
Are you flatly rejecting all religious accommodations? Sikh police cannot wear a turban?
Yes, just as Native Americans have always been given a pass on peyote for religious purposes.
Of course, one has to distinguish legitimate religions from quackery, but once that hurdle is over then leave them alone.
Also, it is not safe for a 12-year-old girl to go to the movies if Biden is sitting behind her...
I never imagined the amount of Trump-whining on this blog, alone, could fit one the Internet.
Which troll is "Unknown" today?
Why should the private schools have to do what public schools are doing when other private businesses of similar capacity are open?
Only if the Governor's children or grand children attend are they exempt.
Governmental restrictions on the practice of religion are supposed to be subject to 'strict scrutiny' under the First Amendment, a test which in times past almost always meant the government lost. In the two recent cases from NY, involving the RC Diocese of Brooklyn and a Jewish congregation, five justices went out of their way to find that NY's orders failed that test because those orders drew arbitrary distinctions between religious entities and secular entities. NY's opposition focused on the fact that certain secular entities were subject to even more stringent regulations than the religious entities (a fact which the dissenters found significant).
So it comes down to what a court would deem the correct comparator -- in the KY case, is it public schools or is it secular entities more broadly. KY says that the restrictions are needed to prevent the spread of COVID, but the virus doesn't discriminate between types of entities that may cause spreading -- why is a school inherently more dangerous as a potential source of infection that any place else that adults (teachers/staff) and children (students) might be in close contact where the same restrictions don't apply? A version of that argument was persuasive to five justices and that seems to be the religious school's best chance for success. It's just an exercise in using the government's rationale for imposing the restrictions to define the entities that provide the proper comparison for applying strict scrutiny.
"They are not dying from Covid."
Well, except for that Madison East kid over the weekend.
The lumping of low risk pre-pubescent kids and 14-18 year olds who seem to catch and transmit the disease like adults does not help your argument IMO.
The data shows a lot more transmission and cases once kids get past middle school. One size fits all, like usual, might not fit.
The public schools are not opening, not because of public health concerns, but because the public school TEACHERS refuse to come back to work. The government isn't keeping them closed because it needs to, it is keeping the public schools closed because they want to.
The neutral and general applicability so as to give the appearance of equal treatment is transparently a complete pretense and artifice.
Except for that ONE kid.
Tragic, very tragic, as all deaths are, even if the kid actually did die of COVID. The fact is that people do die. They do get sick. That's life.
If the standard for reopening society is that no one ever gets sick and that we somehow abolish death, then we will remain in our government-imposed prisons forever.
"They are not dying from Covid."
Well, except for that Madison East kid over the weekend.
About that...the Wisconsin DHS still reports zero deaths of people under 20. I think there is more to this story.
Howard said...
Our indoor pool just got shut down due to the fact news panic over the common Covid cold. Now I'm going to have to travel to my daughters house on the north shore a couple days a week for some ocean swimming. Life's a Beach.
12/1/20, 8:39 AM
You forgot the part of your story where you moved from California to Boston. Nobody is swimming in the ocean near Boston in December. Wetsuits, dry suits, don't make me laugh.
"Except for that ONE kid."
Yes, that's the totally bullshit lefty 'If it saves just one child' argument.
That argument is to institute and maintain power and control.
If that argument were taken to its logical conclusion, we would ban almost every activity in life and stay bubble-wrapped in our homes.
I fucking HATE that argument.
Obadiah said...
In total they show about 300k excess deaths during 2020, which is more than the official count of Covid deaths, not less. See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
So an unusually high number of people have died this year in the US, whether due to Covid or something else. It's hard to imagine that Covid isn't playing a big role in that result.
Hmm, let's see, 12 million people unemployed, businesses destroyed, social interaction blocked, people trapped in their homes, unable to get out and exercise, or do the fun things that kept their lives worth living.
And, more people dying.
I wonder. Do you think there could be a connection between the two?
The governor should have only limited powers to shut down private entities for public safety. The government should bear a burden of proof that such measures are efficacious and necessary and will extend for only a reasonable amount of time.
"Except for that ONE kid."
Today's death numbers are out and still zero deaths under 20.
It's been six days since the patient died, I'm pretty sure that DHS would know about it by now if it really happened.
Tequila bar applies to become church to skirt COVID-19 lockdown rules (UK)
serious question
of the people that died of covid in new jersey...
How many of them had a DNR order?
Unknown said...
I never imagined the amount of Trump-whining on this blog, alone, could fit one the Internet.
A quick, easy ctrl-F search for the word "Trump" on this subject's comment section finds the first (and only, until my comment here) use of that word to be from Unknown. Such a huge amount of Trump-whining!!
Can't we all work together to get a better class of trolls on this site? It's embarrassing.
I like it simple. Is the restriction on an individual going to school the same as going to a movie as going to a grocery store, etc?
If the restrictions were on the individual rather than the business or organization, it would make it simpler.
And if the restrictions were on individuals, just maybe governors and mayors would be held accountable.
Lockdowns, mask mandates, curfews- they're all a violation of constitutional rights, which rights the courts have allowed to be suspended as an emergency measure. But it's been 9 months now, and at some point the states should have to either justify these impositions and prove that whatever good effect they're having (if any) can't be achieved by some legally supportable means, such as quarantining people who are actually sick, rather than quarantining the entire population.
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