The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal of a San Diego church that was seeking to overturn Gov. Newsom’s Tier 1 indoor worship ban.
South Bay United Pentecostal Church sued Gov. Newsom in California Southern District Court, alleging that state officials had relegated California churches, pastors, and people of faith to third-class citizenship.
“Defendants have no compelling justification for their discriminatory treatment of churches, pastors and people of faith, nor have they attempted in any way to tailor their regulations to the least restrictive means necessary to meet any arguable compelling interest,” wrote attorney Charles S. LiMandri in South Bay United Pentecostal’s complaint.
Last week, however, a Ninth Circuit three-justice panel decided against helping parishioners return to indoor church services.
“Although there is no record evidence that attendance at South Bay’s services, in particular, has contributed to the spread of the virus, the record does evidence outbreaks tied to religious gatherings in San Diego County and in the Southern California region,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw stated in the Jan. 25 opinion. “And, certainly, California’s public health experts have concluded that indoor gatherings of any kind are exactly what magnifies the risk of exposure.”
As of February 1, California had 3,258,706 confirmed coronavirus cases, resulting in 40,908 deaths, according to the state’s COVID dashboard.
“What the South Bay panel ignored is that in Tier 1 there are 29 single-spaced pages of exemptions that cover hundreds of categories of non-religious assembly and businesses and they're exempt from the total ban, except churches are banned and so the discrimination in Tier 1 is worse even than in Tiers 2 and 3," said Matthew Staver, an attorney with Liberty Counsel law firm.
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, under the state's Blueprint for a Safer Economy, Tier 1, also known as the purple zone, is the most restrictive of all color-coded zones. San Diego is classified under Tier 1, which bans indoor church services.
“What the Ninth Circuit did in Tiers 2 and 3 is strike down the numerical limitation of 100 and 200 people and then said we have to use a percentage of occupancy but the problem is they never said what percentage,” Staver said. “There's different percentages of occupancy. So those entities that were in tier two and three never had a numerical cap. They only had a percentage of occupancy.
On Jan. 24, Gov. Newsom lifted regional stay-at-home orders without changing Tier 1, which remains a no indoor worship zone.
“It’s been like that for a good portion of the state since July 13,” Staver said. “The regional stay-at-home worship ban was also the same. So, there was really no difference in that with respect to churches.”