The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) recently decided a case regarding indoor worship services in California. As with many SCOTUS decisions, the justices were divided largely along partisan lines, with the majority ruling generally that California had not given proper deference to the First Amendment when limiting church services.
California argued that the COVID-19 pandemic justified a restriction of church’s activities, and apparently disparate treatment of church life and other activities. The majority disagreed, and the concerns of the dissenting justices are revealing.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, complained that the majority had “displaced the judgment of experts” regarding safety-based church restrictions, and wondered if “the Court does not believe the science, or does it think even the best science must give way?”
One is prompted to wonder what Justice Kagan thinks is the “best science” in this regard.
The “science” regarding COVID-19 has been all over the proverbial laboratory since the virus first appeared: science has advocated “two weeks to flatten the curve”; science has said masks were good, then they weren’t, then one was good, then two was better; science has said that the virus survived long periods on surfaces, until it didn’t; science has said that only a narrow segment of the population is at particular risk, but everyone should be quarantined, tested, masked, and inoculated; science has said everyone should be vaccinated, but vaccinations won’t eliminate masks, distancing, and shutdowns; science has all but ignored the consequences — scientifically deduced — from the now year-long scientific approach, which includes higher rates of domestic violence, drug use, suicide, and economic woes.
Which, “science,” then, is “best”?
That a Supreme Court justice would suggest that the Court’s understanding of constitutional law would defer to science, much less the “best science,” is alarming.
“Science” is all but settled on many significant questions of the day, and further has the potential to negate all reasonable judgment in favor of “experts” who could very well be wrong.
After all, it is modern “science” that contends that lithium mines are “greener” than pipelines, that burning corn in cars is better than people eating it, that unborn babies are “blobs of tissue” or parasites to be excised from the mother’s body at will, and it is “science” that has determined that biological sex is a social construct and that boys competing in girls’ sports are really girls, after all, and you shouldn’t argue with “science,” because, well, “trust the experts.”
As someone once said, “An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.”