The Louisiana Supreme Court last week found Gov. John Bel Edwards’ restrictions on places of worship during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic unconstitutional, concluding that the state cannot punish the Rev. Tony Spell for violating those orders.
“We find certain provisions of two executive orders, as applied to the defendant, violate his fundamental right to exercise religion, do not survive strict scrutiny and are thus unconstitutional,” the court said in its Friday ruling.
At issue before the high court were executive orders issued in the spring of 2020 that restricted the size of gatherings in a single place to help stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The orders included many exceptions, however, including airports, medical facilities, grocery stores, factories and department stores. But churches were not exempt and not considered as essential service in Edwards’ stay-at-home order, the court said.
Spell has not disputed the fact that he led church services while the coronavirus orders were in effect and that the numbers of worshipers attending the services exceeded the limitations in the orders.
“The gist of the opinion is that you can’t give advantages to every other kind of business and then relegate freedom of religion to second place or last place,” Spell’s attorney, Jeff Wittenbrink, told the Louisiana Record. “... The Constitution doesn’t go away during a pandemic.”
The governor’s orders simply did not make any sense, according to Wittenbrink. At one point Spell’s church services were limited to 50 people, and later 10 people, while down the road, thousands of people were making their way through Walmart, he said.
“The orders themselves were just not done properly,” Wittenbrink said.
Chief justice John Weimer dissented from the majority decision, writing that the matter should have been remanded to district court to sort out all relevant facts during highly unusual circumstances at the beginning of the health emergency.
“In sum, the resolution of this matter transcends the case immediately before the court and requires the difficult balancing of the authority of the executive branch to take steps to protect the public at the outset of an unpredictable and novel virus that quickly spread throughout the world, causing death and disability, against the impact on religious freedom to gather inside a church for services,” Weimer wrote.