https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-cheer-trumpist-judge-launches-084518995.html
Donald Trump’s allies are turning the battle against coronavirus into a culture war by claiming that social-distancing rules are a government attack on Christianity.
The Department of Justice announced Attorney General William Barr is poised to sue states that limit the ability of parishioners to pray together in the midst of this pandemic. A number of Republican governors, including
Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have exempted religious services from some or all of their states’ social-distancing rules.
And a judge recently appointed to the federal bench, who Trump may be grooming for a Supreme Court nomination, is now wildly attacking social-distancing rules as a supposedly grievous “threat” to Christian “believers.”
Justin Walker, a 38-year-old former law clerk to Brett Kavanaugh, is among the crop of young, extremely conservative lawyers Trump has installed on the federal bench. While the American Bar Association rated Walker “not qualified,” because he had less than 12 years of experience as a practicing lawyer,
that did not prevent GOP senators from confirming him last year. On March 13, Mitch McConnell shut down the Senate in the midst of negotiations for the first coronavirus-relief bill and traveled back to Kentucky to attend a celebration of Walker’s investiture as a federal judge; Kavanaugh presided over the event. Then, this month, Trump nominated Walker to serve on the D.C. Circuit, the appellate court on which Kavanaugh previously sat, and a frequent source of Supreme Court nominees.
Walker repaid that faith in his career last week, in a case brought by the On Fire Christian Center against the City of Louisville and its mayor, by ruling that the church should be permitted to conduct a drive-in service, in violation of the city’s stay-at-home order.
The case was actually much ado about nothing, because, as
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reported, Louisville had no intention of enforcing its order against the church. Rather, the police were merely being instructed to hand out information about health risks to attending parishioners and to record license-plate numbers to perform contact-tracing in the event that any attendees later became sick.
But Walker, who did not provide the city with an opportunity to provide its side of the case, had little interest in the facts. Rather, he wanted to make a very loud statement, which he did in his opinion, which opened with a
declaration that “On Holy Thursday, an American Mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter.”
What followed was an extraordinarily tendentious screed in which Walker described the city’s public-health regulations as evocative of a dystopian novel. The judge compared Louisville’s mayor to the English persecutors of the Pilgrims, as well as to Southern plantation owners who “flogged slaves for attending prayer meetings.” Walker also managed to bring abortion and birth control into the case, decrying “government” efforts to “force religious business owners to buy pharmaceuticals they consider abortion inducing” and “conscript[ing] nuns to provide birth control.”
The relevance of these matters to Louisville’s efforts to prevent citizens from infecting themselves and others with a deadly virus was, to say the least, unclear; but the references served Walker’s apparent goal of getting the juices of right-wing religious activists flowing. Walker closed his opinion by suggesting he was vindicating the rights of “believers” to celebrate the passion that followed the “state-sponsored murder of God’s only son”; the implication that the city’s sponsorship of social-distancing rules worked a similar kind of evil was clear.
