God apparently won’t hear your prayers if you wear a mask according to a Florida pastor suing to overturn a local mask mandate. Apparently, God needs to read lips.
Rev. Joel Tillis, a pastor at Suncoast Baptist Church in Palmetto, has joined forces with a Republican state lawmaker to nullify a local ordinance that requires people to wear masks inside businesses and churches when social distancing isn’t possible.
Related: More defiant pastors linked to COVID outbreaks as virus ravages churches nationwide
State Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R) joined Tillis for a rally outside of the Manatee County Courthouse to celebrate filing the ridiculous lawsuit. Sabatini has filed over a dozen similar lawsuits across the state.
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The simple coronavirus prevention measure is “a radical infringement of the reasonable and legitimate expectation of privacy and facial autonomy in addition to the medical privacy by forcing them to wear masks for the majority of the day,” according to the lawsuit.
The local county commission is dominated by Republicans.
“This is not an issue of right or left, Republican or Democrat. This is not even an issue of Trump or Biden. This is an issue of right and wrong,” Tillis told the crowd. “The resolution is wrong legally. The resolution is wrong biblically. The resolution is wrong medically. The resolution is wrong, and we do not accept it under any circumstances.”
COVID diagnoses have soared in Florida over the past month as the state’s Republican governor, staunch Trump ally Ron DeSantis, has bungled the response and downplayed the severity. The state currently has 492,000 confirmed infections and over 7,000 people have died.
Medical experts say that wearing a mask helps to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, but flouting the law has become a conservative cause championed by Trump. Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died after contracting the coronavirus shortly after attending a Trump campaign rally without a mask.
