In recent days, courts have said that dancing topless in Buffalo is protected by the First Amendment, while attending church in Nevada isn’t.
Covid can’t keep you away from a stripper, but it can keep you away from your priest.
You may gather by the thousands to shout vulgarities at the cops – or burn down cities in the Northwest – but you can’t go to the gym or the amusement park, or hold your wedding or funeral.
It’s covid-1984 and the deadly pathogen is not a novel virus, it is an all-powerful government. The bug will come and go, the lust for and exercise of power is here to stay. And on Friday, in an unwritten opinion of the Supreme Court, we came to the hill some of us are willing to die on.
The people at a Calvary Chapel in rural Nevada, near Carson City, took the First Amendment at its word.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” says the first enumerated right of all Americans, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
They believed that the free exercise of their religion included going to church. Everybody going to church. But the state of Nevada said no. It said that, though bars and casinos in the state may seat at 50 percent of their building’s capacity, churches may welcome no more than 50 people total.
That means that, under the dictate of Nevada’s Democrat governor, there is a greater right to go to a bar than there is a church. Which seems to be a prohibition of the free exercise of religion. Which seems to be a direct, unquestionable violation of the First Amendment.
Until it gets to the Supreme Court, where the panel’s four Democrats and one douche rejected the claim of Calvary Chapel without so much as a word of explanation. Nothing. No nuance, no delineation, just a shut up and do what you’re told.
Which seems to be the message of government all across the nation, especially in New York, where restriction seems to exist merely for the sake of restriction, as if a virus has been used as an excuse for revolution and suppression. Leftists in the streets with their fists in the air and totalitarians in office with their boots on our necks.
All combining together to have the effect of weakening and oppressing a nation conceived in liberty.
Where now there is not liberty to worship.
Why? What possible hyper contagion is it within the hearts of congregated worshippers that so worries our government masters? Are they, through months of the suppression of worship, trying to drive the habit of church out of the American heart? Are they afraid, learning from the experience of other progressive oppressors in Russia, China and Poland, that opposition and resistance are bred in churches by people of faith?
Or is it merely a humiliating insult, a demonstration of power as a reminder of dominance. To take the deepest and most sacred aspects of freedom of conscience, to take the first and fundamental constitutional right, and to stomp it into the mud. If this right is not a right, then no right is a right.
And so it is that Andrew Cuomo and his ilk do what Darius and his ministers could not. The ancient Mede king forbad free worship, yet Daniel still worshipped the Hebrew God, and faced the lions’ den for it. The modern caesar closed down the churches, and now caps their occupancy at a third, and we lack the faith and courage of ancient Daniel.
And the Supreme Court says that’s fine.
The Constitution doesn’t mean what it says, the First Amendment only applies to progressive journalists and progressive protesters, equality requires some to have priority, looting is liberating but worshipping is enslaving, the majority is not the voice of the people it is the oppressor of the people, the government is not your servant it is your master, four legs good and two legs better.
And that’s the new America. Raise your fist and salute, fall to your knee and submit, you will find no relief in the courts.
They deny us the right to worship together, to make us spiritually weak. They deny is the right to go to the gym, to make us physically weak. And they forbid our mass gathering, to keep us from organizing against them.
And the thing we’re bothered by is masks at the grocery store.