CNA Staff, Apr 21, 2020 / 17:00 pm
Public religious services cannot be stopped "indefinitely" during the pandemic, especially when liquor stores are considered "essential" businesses, two law professors argued in the New York Times on Tuesday.
"In the early weeks of the crisis, it made sense to enforce sweeping closure rules against all public gatherings - no exceptions," wrote Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at the Stanford Law School, and Max Raskin, an adjunct professor of law at New York University, in a New York Times op-ed published on Thursday.
"But in the days ahead," the professors said, religious and political leaders will need to come to agreements that uphold public safety while allowing for the free exercise of religion to the maximum extent possible.
They went on to point out that other "important activities - from shopping in hardware stores to voting - manage to take place with appropriate safeguards against the spread of the disease," they said.