I don’t ascribe to any particular religious denomination or theology. However, I respect that others do. I believe that faith is a private matter of conscience and definitely not the business of the government.
Some of the greatest injustices throughout history have resulted from government either fostering or condemning religion. Our founders recognized that when they made protecting religious freedom primary among the rights enumerated in the Constitution.
The first sentence in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
“Make no law” seems pretty clear, and the United States Supreme Court long ago said that applies to State government as well.
Apparently the Democrat Governor of California, and the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (comprised almost entirely of Judges appointed by Democrat Presidents) are incapable of understanding the simple, clear language of that Amendment. Last Friday evening, the Supreme Court issued an injunction preventing California’s Governor from enforcing restrictions he arbitrarily imposed on religious gatherings in private homes under the pretext of the “COVID crisis”.
The Supreme Court noted that, “This is the fifth time the Court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of California’s COVID restrictions on religious exercise.” Five times now, the Justices have had to explain to California’s Governor, and the Ninth Circuit Court judges, that two simple words “no law” mean “no law”. Proof positive that nowadays an American college “education” doesn’t necessarily make you functionally literate.
The basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling was that the restrictions were not applied equally to secular gatherings. The Court noted that religious practice was very clearly singled out by the Governor for discriminatory treatment.
The California Governor’s discrimination against religious gatherings reminds me of Nazi laws restricting Jews from certain activities while leaving others free to do so. Like the Nazi’s using the Reichstag fire to take control of Germany, California’s Governor is trying to use COVID to increase his own power. The difference is our First Amendment restricts the authority of the governor to do so.
There appears to be a concerted bias against religion by Democrat government officials. Last year in similar case, the Supreme Court barred New York’s Democrat Governor from using COVID to impose discriminatory restrictions on religious gatherings without similar restrictions on secular ones.
In another example of functional illiteracy, Democrat Pennsylvania officials apparently didn’t comprehend the words the Supreme Court wrote in 2013, when it prevented a regulation enacted under Obamacare from being used to force Hobby Lobby to offer contraceptive health care contrary to the religious belief of the business owner. So in 2020, the Court repeated itself by ruling against Pennsylvania in favor of the Catholic nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor who objected to including contraceptives in their health insurance plan.
Apparently Democrats think nuns need birth control.
In 2018, the Supreme Court rebuked Colorado bureaucrats who tried to compel a baker to violate his personal religious beliefs. In that case the Court again illustrated that the government was discriminating based on religion.
In none of those cases were the religious practitioners forcing their beliefs on others. They only wanted government to leave them alone to follow their faith. This country was founded by people just like them who simply wanted to believe as they wished without government persecution. The ‘free exercise of religion’ clause of the First Amendment exists precisely to prevent government from restricting “free exercise”. Apparently some government officials can’t comprehend the meaning of those words. Functional illiteracy.
As I said, I’m not religious, and I don’t like those who are proselytizing to me. But I can ignore them. What I like even less, and can’t ignore, are government officials using their authority to further their anti-religious bigotry. As German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller lamented after the Holocaust, “They came for the Jews, And I did not speak out… because I was not a Jew.”