December 15, 2020 04:37 PM UTC

Even Now, God Helps Those Who Aren't COVIDiots

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

The Denver Post’s Shelly Bradbury reports, and it’s not something we can ignore:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of a northern Colorado church that sued Gov. Jared Polis over capacity limits on religious gatherings, reiterating a stance the highest court took in a similar case last month.

High Plains Harvest Church in Weld County sued Polis and Colorado public health officials in May over the state’s orders limiting attendance at houses of worship to 50 people…

The ruling isn’t expected to have a major impact on religious services in Colorado because the state already lifted its limits on in-person attendance at such gatherings. Three Supreme Court justices dissented from Tuesday’s ruling because of that change, on the grounds the case is moot.

The state had already announced in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against New York’s restrictions on attendance to worship services that capacity limits would not be enforced. But as Michael Karlik at the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog writes, the religious right activists who filed suit in Colorado were determined to get their very own ruling:

The attorney for Harvest High Plains Church, Barry K. Arrington, told The Denver Post it was not a certainty that capacity limits via health orders would never present another problem for his client.

“The state has in the past amended this thing willy-nilly, and there is nothing to stop them from amending it tomorrow,” he said.

Readers will perhaps know attorney Barry Arrington best as the counsel for Rocky Mountain Gun Owners in their failed legal fight against the 2013 gun safety reform measures passed by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper. Arrington also represented a Longmont charter school a few years ago who had snubbed their LGBT valedictorian like Jesus would do. Mark Hotaling, pastor of the strip-mall High Plains Harvest Church (photo above right), is another close associate of RMGO’s Dudley Brown and the related faction of the Colorado Republican Party.

Now for starters, once you realize that all this hullaballoo is over a restriction to 50 persons in a building as small as the one that apparently houses Mark Hotaling’s microchurch, it’s tough to objectively stay very outraged. Back in July, Karlik reports, Hotaling was delighted to announce his allowed capacity had been increased to 73–close to a “normal size” service, he said then, and if you ask us still way too many people to safely congregate in this modest little storefront. Sometime after that, Hotaling filed suit for twice that capacity…but who knows if they even needed it?

What this all boils down to, of course, is the new solidly conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority flexing as it overturns the decisions made earlier in the pandemic by a different Court. The winners in this case are Colorado’s hard-right usual suspects making up the unholy alliance of the religious right and gun fetishists, and this court victory is a consolation prize after a another disastrous election cycle for Colorado Republicans in general and this faction of the party in particular.

Nominally Gov. Jared Polis is the defendant in the case of High Plains Harvest Church v. Polis, but the real loser is everyone with an interest in slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we’ve said many times before the right in the abstract to do a thing does not make it wise, and politicizing public health during this pandemic has fomented popular resistance to common sense that should have never been allowed to take root.

But here we are. COVIDiocy is here to stay, and so is Amy Coney Barrett.