A federal judge slapped down D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s church shutdown policy late Friday, chiding the city for restricting freedom of worship during the coronavirus pandemic even when churches were willing to take precautions.
The ruling, issued late Friday, allows Capitol Hill Baptist Church to resume in-person outdoor services, as long as precautions are taken.
A powerful photo filed by the church in a recent court brief captured the hypocrisy of the city, showing Mayor Bowser standing without a mask amid a tightly packed crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in June, while refusing to allow outdoor religious services unless the numbers were limited.
The city had said the church could instead meet outside the District, conduct services by radio, or have a limit on the number of people that could attend.
But Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee to the bench, said none of those met the church’s deeply held religious need to meet as a whole congregation.
And he said the city’s argument that the church should have acted sooner is undercut by records showing Capitol Hill Baptist Church had been negotiating for months to try to reach a solution — though had always insisted that the full congregation must be allowed to worship together.
He ruled that Ms. Bowser’s pandemic rules violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires any restriction on worship to be the most narrowly tailored possible.
“The church has consistently represented that it will take appropriate precautions such as holding services outdoors, providing for social distancing, and requiring marks,” he wrote. “The District has not put forward sufficient evidence showing that prohibiting a gathering with these precautions is necessary to protect the public.”
Judge McFadden also accused the city of “sandbagging” the church with a last-minute legal filing suggesting church gatherings are virus hotspots.
The judge said not only did the filing come in late, but it also used data from indoor services in March, at the beginning of the pandemic, before social distancing and masks were in regular use. And in its late filings the city’s health officials admitted they hadn’t reviewed Capitol Hill Baptist Church’s own proposals.
The Justice Department had weighed in on the side of the church.
