The Morning Rant

Back in, what, March or April, we got our first lockdown. Meetings were restricted to 25 or less. Many churches shut down and/or went to online service. My church is small, but not that small, so we thought we could manage if we went to two services. It wasn't the same, but it was better than a Zoom chat.

Now, we believe that the state really has no authority over the church in this matter, i.e. our worship, including when and how often we meet. But, since this was an unprecedented (for us) public health issue, we decided, OK, maybe the state has a point, we'll go along with it for now and see how it plays out.

And then, after a couple of months, our governor relaxed the guidelines a bit so meetings could now have a maximum of 50 (which is about our size) as long as social distancing guidelines are followed. So we said, yay, we can meet again, and it was great. We even started to pick up a few families from larger churches that were still closed.

And then I guess we had a spike in covid cases because our governor then tightened up the restrictions. This was a month or so ago. And this was after a summer of seeing a bunch of "lockdowns for your group but not for this other group" type favoritism going on, where, for example, strip clubs could remain open but churches couldn't. And government a number of officials were photographed in public maskless, no social distancing, etc., and we figured they thought covid couldn't be all that bad, because they obviously weredn't taking it seriously.

Anyway, so we decided we were going to ignore the new lockdown edicts. We're small enough that we're pretty much under the radar, but if some Karen ratted us out, we were prepared to deal with it. And then the rules changed again. Now we're permitted 25% building capacity, but it's not posted anywhere at the building we're renting, so we have no idea what the occupancy number is.

This is why we don't care anymore.

But now the good news: I was told by another church member that our governor has changed the rules for places of worship to "recommendations". That is, they carry no legal force. This come in the wake of some recent court rulings against some state governments. My guess is that she could read the writing on the wall and didn't want to spend resources on a court fight that she knows the state would probably lose.

So hooray for us. We've received an early Christmas present.

Harsh But Fair:

Thief

I Wish:

Who Dis:

For the 'Ettes:

Friday Who Dis: Leigh Snowden, who died young from cancer at age 51, and Sally Field's stepdad Jock Mahoney were together in the 1956 film I've Lived Before.

Today's Edition Of The Morning Rant Is Brought To You By Eggs, Potatoes, and Bacon:

posted by OregonMuse at 11:14 AM

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