Moscow, Idaho, Must Pay Three Christians $300,000 for 2020 Arrests Over Not Wearing Masks at Peaceful Protest

Never again should we, the American people, submit to government mask mandates, vaccine mandates, or business closures. The government overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we gave our elected officials more power because some of us were afraid.

Now we understand what we lost.

The government will not give up this power.

Our government ordered churches to limit the number of people at worship services. Our government ordered churches closed. And some pastors complied. One pastor, John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California, did not.

“We stand firm to continue fulfilling our biblical mandate from Christ to proclaim the Gospel and assemble together, and I earnestly hope that our stance will encourage other pastors, churches, and the general public across America and the world to also stand firm for biblical Truth. Church is essential,” he said.

The government went after Pastor MacArthur with a vengeance. But he won. California and Los Angeles County paid him $800,000 to settle the lawsuit he filed against them.

Fox News recently reported on another settlement. The police arrested three churchgoers in Moscow, Idaho, in September 2020, for not wearing masks or “social distancing” at a peaceful, Psalm-singing protest outside city hall in Moscow. The police charged Gabriel Rench and Sean and Rachel Bohnet with violating the city’s health ordinance, although the ordinance contained exemptions for constitutionally protected activities. An excerpt:

A magistrate judge later dismissed the city’s case against them, and U.S. District Court Judge Morrison C. England, Jr., wrote in his Feb. 1, 2023 memorandum and order denying the city’s motion to dismiss that the “plaintiffs should never have been arrested in the first place, and the constitutionality of what the City thought [its] code said is irrelevant.”

“Somehow, every single City official involved overlooked the exclusionary language [of constitutionally protected behavior] in the Ordinance,” the judge further wrote.

Now the city must pay Rench and the Bohnets $300,000.

“I think it’s no secret that portions of our government and political groups are now starting to target Christians in a way that has never really happened in America or Canada,” Rench told Fox News. “I’m in a conservative state, but I live in a liberal town, and the liberals had no problem arresting me for practicing my religious rights and my Constitutional rights. But my [Republican] governor also didn’t defend me either.”