A church in Louisville, Kentucky, says it has filed a temporary restraining order against Mayor Greg Fischer for not allowing drive-in services during the coronavirus pandemic, reports the Louisville Courier-Journal.
First Liberty Institute, a non-profit public interest law firm, announced Friday it had filed the order on behalf of On Fire Christian Church "seeking to block [Fischer's] prohibition on churches holding drive-in churches during the COVID-19 pandemic," officials said.
"Protecting basic religious freedoms is essential, in both good times and bad," Roger Byron, senior counsel at First Liberty, told the paper. "We continue to advise religious institutions to follow the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines and avoid mass gatherings, but the mayor's prohibition on drive-in church services goes beyond those guidelines and violates state and federal law."
Fischer on Friday said Louisville Metro Police officers would be writing down the license plate numbers of those who attend church services over Easter weekend. The information would be given to the city's health department.
"If we allowed this in Louisville, we'd have hundreds of thousands of people driving around the city Sunday, and boy, the virus would just love that," Fischer said.
There are 1,693 people with positive coronavirus tests in Kentucky as of Friday evening. Ninety people have died.