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Dem DC Mayor Hit with Lawsuit Over 'Unscientific and Discriminatory' Church Restrictions

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Washington, D.C., Archbishop Wilton Gregory filed a lawsuit on Friday against Mayor Muriel Bowser accusing the Democrat of “arbitrary” and “discriminatory” coronavirus restrictions on churches.

“Under both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the District’s arbitrary, unscientific, and discriminatory treatment of religious worship is illegal,” the lawsuit said.

Represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archbishop requested an injunction allowing “sufficient time before Christmas Eve to allow the Archdiocese to plan and celebrate Mass with percentage-based limits rather than a 50-person cap.”

“As Christmas fast approaches, the District has imposed arbitrary 50-person caps on Mass attendance–even for masked, socially-distant services, and even when those services are held in churches that can in normal times host over a thousand people,” the lawsuit said, noting that D.C. imposes capacity-based limits on libraries, laundromats, retail stores, fitness centers and other establishments.

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Gregory argued that Bowser’s restrictions are unscientific since they “bear no relation to either the size of the building or the safety of the activity” as well as discriminatory since they “single out religious worship as a disfavored activity, even though it has been proven safer than many other activities the District favors.”

The lawsuit also said that half of the Archdiocese of Washington’s churches can accommodate 500 or more worshipers: St. Matthew’s Cathedral fits over 1,000 and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic church in the United States, can hold thousands.

“Indeed, the Statue of Liberty would fit inside with room to spare,” the lawsuit said. “Yet under the Mayor’s orders, all of these churches are subject to the same cap of 50 people.”

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“These arbitrary restrictions violate the rights of more than 650,000 D.C.-area Catholics, who–at the end of this most difficult year–now face the chilling prospect of being told that there is no room for them at the Church this Christmas,” the suit continued.

Bowser’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Several religious freedom cases have come before courts this year amid nationwide lockdown measures.

The Supreme Court recently ruled against Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on worship, calling them “far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.”

Earlier this year, the court ruled in favor of religious restrictions in California and Nevada.

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