California church wins legal battle over lockdowns, receives $800K in settlement with LA, state
After months of legal battles, Pastor John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church of Sun Valley has settled with the City of Los Angeles and the State of California for $800,000.
When the health authority mandated lockdowns of churches in the spring of 2020, MacArthur and his church complied. He acknowledged that at the outset of the pandemic the projections of high death tolls warranted a response and that it was “enough to make anybody with common sense” act carefully.
After being closed for a time, the church resumed with in-person worship services. After streaming online services for a number of weeks, MacArthur said that people started showing up again.
As the church openly defied imposed mandates, MacArthur was threatened with jail time for his actions. Appearing on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle last September, MacArthur appeared unphased at the prospect of imprisonment.
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MacArthur is not the first church leader to defeat the California government over coronavirus restrictions. Father Trevor Burfitt, who is a priest of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), claimed a huge victory last December when a court ruling demanded that “all harassment” of churchgoers by health officials “immediately cease.”
The harassment was “deemed unconstitutional,” and such orders cannot be enforced, according to attorney Paul M. Jonna of the Thomas More Society, which represented Burfitt.
Regarding a separate lawsuit against California’s restrictions, the Supreme Court issued a decision stating that the state’s church restrictions were unlawful: “[G]overnment regulations are not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause, whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.”
As a result of the ruling on the MacArthur lawsuit and other Supreme Court decisions, the California Department of Public Health downgraded capacity limits for “places of worship” from “mandatory” to “strongly recommended.”
Source:
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