An emergency petition filed with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) by a Pasadena church group seeks to overturn Gov. Gavin Newsom’s color-coded COVID-19 restrictions.
On Nov. 25, Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry asked the nation's highest court to grant an injunction so that restrictions of any color or tier would no longer apply to religious freedoms or houses of worship.
“We're challenging all of Gov. Newsom’s tiers across the board,” attorney Matthew Staver, senior pastor, founder, and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said. “Our main church, Harvest Rock, is in the purple zone or tier one, which allows no religious assembly at all.”
The church has been in the purple zone since the lawsuit was filed on July 18 in the Eastern District of California. The complaint alleges that a ban on singing and chanting activities in a church violates the U.S. Constitution. Last month, Gov. Newsom expanded the purple zone restrictions to 41 of 58 counties.
“It's very clear the way he crafted these restrictions that he is directly discriminating against religious worship,” Staver told the Southern California Record about Gov. Newsom. “He considers church non-essential and so therefore he discriminates against it and treats it as though it's non-essential.”
Because SCOTUS overturned New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's religious restrictions on Nov. 25, Staver is confident there will be a favorable outcome for churches in the state of California.
“Our case has even stronger facts than the New York case because in New York they had a potential mootness issue as to whether the restrictions had been removed but in our case restrictions are clearly still in place,” he said. “They had a limitation of a certain number and we have no worship at all. Then, in tiers 2 and 3, when you get out of the no worship zone of tier one, you have clear discrimination between places of worship and other similar gatherings.”
Staver is a former dean at Liberty University Law School.
As previously reported, SCOTUS issued a temporary injunction that prevents Gov. Cuomo from enforcing limits of 10 and 25 worshipers after five Justices decided that the state’s virus risk classifications discriminated against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America.
“The U.S. Supreme Court could certainly reaffirm this in California,” Staver said. “Gov. Newsom is pretty hypocritical in how he operates because he tells people not to gather but outside for two hours on Thanksgiving and you have to wear a mask but he goes to a birthday party with no social distancing, no mask and then apologizes for it. He violates his own orders.”
Gov. Newsom was criticized for attending a dinner party at French Laundry restaurant on Nov. 6 consisting of some 12 people from different households in Napa County to celebrate the birthday of one of his political advisors, according to media reports.