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A Ventura County Superior Court judge issued an emergency temporary restraining order today against Godspeak Calvary Chapel and its Pastor Rob McCoy. The church has been holding indoor worship services asserting its constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. The judge ordered the parties to return to court on August 31, 2020 to argue whether a preliminary injunction should be issued pending trial. The church intends to present expert witnesses for the purpose of establishing that the State of California and the County of Ventura lack a compelling interest for the prohibition of indoor worship services and that the decision to prevent indoor worship services, while allowing other indoor activities, is arbitrary and without a rational basis. Godspeak Calvary Chapel will file a cross complaint against both the County of Ventura, State of California and the officials enforcing the orders.  

“We believe the judge should have left the status quo and allowed the church to continue meeting until a full trial on the validity of the state and county orders could be conducted. With 79 COVID-19 related deaths and 7,953 confirmed cases in Ventura County, the risk of death from infection is effectively 1%. But the risk of death for those in the Ventura County under 65 years old is only 0.18% and even less those persons who have no underlying health conditions. However, as argued in our pleadings, If we factor the number of persons who likely had COVID-19 antibodies but didn’t know it, the number of cases could be approximately 34,686 (based on a USC study: https://news.usc.edu/168987/antibody-testing-results-covid-19-infections-los-angeles-county). This would mean that the actual rate of death for persons under 65 who contract COVID-19 could be as low as 0.043%. Meanwhile, knee replacement causes death to approximately 1 in every 200 patients or 0.5% of the patients (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5213964/).  Is the state and county going to soon ban knee replacements or other elective surgeries that have death rates in excess of the COVID-19? We believe that COVID-19 can be fought with far less restrictive measures than banning all healthy persons from church and our expert witnesses will prove that.”  

Author: Press Release

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