Typhoid Marys, court-empowered

Thursday's Supreme Court ruling against New York state's efforts to fight covid-19 by restricting church gatherings is an example of what we can expect now that the appointment of Coathanger Coney has entrenched the religio-wingnut majority on the highest court in the land.  Decisions will be made based on the interests of Christian supremacism, with some threadbare "reasoning" tacked on as an afterthought.

An example of the latter would be Gorsuch's comparison of church services with going to a store to buy a bicycle or a bottle of wine, as if just one person stepping inside a building for the few minutes such a transaction requires could be compared with packing many people indoors for an hour or two of singing, chanting, and whatever other intensive virus-spreading behaviors their particular sect's weird occult rituals require.  We already know how this works.  There have been countless examples of church services and events causing large-scale outbreaks of covid-19.  I have yet to hear of any such disasters being traced to liquor stores.

More salient is the assertion that New York's restrictions infringed the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion.  Here's why that's nonsense.

A guarantee of the right to free exercise of religion doesn't logically extend to behavior which is harmful to other people.  For example, if the Aztec or Phoenician religions still existed today with large numbers of adherents on US territory, would anyone argue that they should be allowed to perform human sacrifices as they did in their heyday, even though such sacrifices were absolutely central to their beliefs and practices?  Of course not.  And no other Constitutional guarantee is interpreted to include a right to inflict life-threatening danger on other people.  You can own a gun, but if you shoot somebody with it, except in self-defense, you'll be arrested.  You are free from unreasonable searches and seizures, but if the local authorities find out that you're storing large quantities of explosives in your house that could endanger the whole neighborhood, they will do something about it.  Even lesser infringements on other people's rights are not rendered acceptable by appealing to a Constitutional provision.  Yes, you have the right to "peaceably assemble", but not on my front lawn, if I don't choose to let you. It's absurd to claim that the "free exercise of religion" includes a "right" to amplify a raging pandemic.

But logic and consistency are beside the point here.  To the Christian supremacist mind-set, their primitive stew of ancient ritual, taboo, and superstition takes precedence over such concerns -- and over other modern considerations such as the actual meaning and intent of the First Amendment.  Due to a sequence of historical accidents, that mind-set has now secured a majority on the Supreme Court.  In the near term, not much can be done about this other than enlarging the Court, which is looking less likely given that it will depend on winning the Georgia runoffs and abolishing the filibuster and prioritizing Court enlargement at a time when the government will have many other problems to fix.  The time may have come to take a fresh look at the whole concept of judicial review.