Members of a Baptist church in Greenville, Mississippi were each given $500 tickets by local authorities for sitting in their cars in the church parking lot listening to a sermon from their pastor on the radio.
Police arrived and handed out $500 tickets to each parishioner in attendance despite them all staying in their cars.
The mayor of Greenville issued an executive order that mandated all church buildings close for both in-person and drive-in church services.
During Thursday night service at King James Bible Baptist Church, while parishioners sat in their vehicles listening to Pastor Charles Hamilton, Greenville Police surrounded the church parking lot.
Jeremy Dys, with First Liberty Institute, is representing Pastor Hamilton and says police were violating the church's constitutional right while enforcing a curfew order from Mayor Errick Simmons.
“They park in their parking spaces, they keep their windows up, the doors closed, they never get out of the cars like the CDC recommends they do,” Dys said. “There's no exception to the United States Constitution for a pandemic. What Mayor Simmons has done is to apply an order without regard to equality and he's singled out churches in particular.”
King James Bible Baptist isn't the only Greenville church police visited.
“We have everybody stay in their cars, with their windows up and go to a certain radio station, a low frequency station,” said Lee Gordon with Temple Baptist Church.
Kelly Shackelford, president of the First Liberty Institute, says that the city’s order and the police’s action is “is just massively unconstitutional.”
He points out that “it targets churches in a way that it targets no other group. Cars in parking lots are fine. It’s only a crime if the cars in the parking lot are at the church parking lot.”
As Jon Gabriel, Editor-in-chief of Ricochet writes “The lawsuits after this lockdown will be unending.