Los Angeles County Humiliated, to Pay Massive Settlement to Megachurch Over Unconstitutional Restrictions

Democrat run Los Angeles County and the State of California were both humiliated by Grace Community Church and it’s pastor John MacArthur.

On Tuesday the Democrat run county Board of Supervisors agreed to pay the church $400,000 to settle claims against it. The state also forked over another $400,000 bringin the total payout to $800,000.

Via the Daily Wire:

“The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to pay Grace Community Church, which garnered national attention for defying governmental COVID-19 restrictions, as part of a settlement agreement.

The county said that it had decided to pay the church based on Supreme Court rulings earlier this year declaring that churches in California could be exempt from enforcement of some of the state’s coronavirus policies. The church will receive $400,000 from the county.

“After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that some public health safety measures could not apply to houses of worship, resolving this litigation is the responsible and appropriate thing to do,” the county’s legal team said in a statement.

“We are grateful to the county’s faith organizations for their continued partnership to keep their congregants and the entire community safe and protected from COVID-19,” they added.

The state of California will pay the church $400,000 as well, bringing the total to $800,000.”

The pastor John MacArthur and Grace Community Church had been locked in a battle with the State of California and Los Angeles County over his decision to keep the church open in the face of government orders to shut down:

“According to MacArthur, actions taken by figures like Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic all but explicitly required that people of faith put government before God — a tyrannical precedent often set in the early days of an authoritarian dictatorship

The only righteous response painted by the pastor was disobedience.

“Look, we obey the law when the law is righteous, when the people in authority are righteous, when they are protecting those who do good and punishing those who do evil,” MacArthur said. “In the case of Hitler, if you had an opportunity to eliminate Hitler and didn’t do it, you would have failed to fulfill a righteous opportunity.”

“I would say you take that opportunity if you have that opportunity and you were within the framework of those who were given the authority to do that. So, this is not to say you roll over and allow any tyrant to do whatever he wants to do. So, you could say, well, this isn’t Hitler yet. Right?” MacArthur said.

“But this is still tyranny,” he added.

“It doesn’t start with massacring 6 million Jews. It doesn’t start with massacring 13 million people between Russia and Germany in the killing fields in those years, the late ’30s and early ’40s. It starts this way. It starts with intrusion into the life of the church, and the violation of law is by the governor because that’s against the First Amendment.”

This is good news that hopefully will serve as a precedent that scares other government agencies and leaders from trying to restrict freedom of religion during an emergency situation.

Both the governor and the county overreached and now the taxpayers are paying the price.

Lets hope the voters in California have enough sense to replace the Governor in less than two weeks to send a strong signal to the wanna-be-dictators in the Democrat party that Americans have had enough.

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