QUOTE: A liberal college town announced that it would pay $300,000 to a group of Christians in Idaho who were arrested for holding an outdoor church service without wearing masks during the pandemic.
The city of Moscow, Idaho — home to the University of Idaho — announced the settlement in the churchgoers’ civil lawsuit last week.
Three churchgoers with Christ Church sued the city after they were arrested in September 2020 at an outdoor “psalm sing” with their church outside Moscow City Hall. The singing protest lasted about 20 minutes. Gabriel Rench and Sean and Rachel Bohnet filed the suit in March 2021, alleging that their First and Fourth Amendments rights were violated.
Footage of the arrests went viral on social media and showed police officers taking Rench’s hymnal away from him before handcuffing him and taking him and the two other people to the county jail. The three were detained at the jail for several hours.
Then-president Donald Trump condemned the arrests at the time, tweeting that Democrats want to shut churches down “permanently.”
The three were charged with violating the city’s public health emergency ordinance, but a judge dismissed the city’s case against them.
A federal judge later denied the city’s request to dismiss the lawsuit from the three people arrested, noting that the city’s pandemic ordinance had an exception for activities protected by the Idaho and U.S. constitutions, such as religious services. The judge said the three never should have been arrested in the first place.
“Somehow, every single City official involved overlooked the exclusionary language [of constitutionally protected behavior] in the Ordinance,” the judge wrote.
Christ Church is a congregation of about 1,000 people and part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
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