Henry Fernandez doesn’t like preaching to an empty room and a camera: “Here I am in this small sanctuary with six people, and I’m trying to ignore the camera and speak normally, and that has been a real challenge for me.”

Though the situation makes him anxious, Fernandez, who pastors Bryce Avenue Presbyterian Church, a Presbyterian Church in America congregation in Los Alamos, N.M., said the decision whether to obey the state’s ban on public gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic was straightforward.

With New York City engulfed by the coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday pleaded with congregations not to gather for worship—and threatened severe repercussions if they did.

As pastors and religious leaders across the country faced tough decisions about whether to hold worship services over the weekend, Pacific Justice Institute President Brad Dacus gathered 500 of them on a conference call on Thursday. They talked about how to keep their ministries going and whether shelter-in-place orders and other restrictions on public gatherings violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The First Amendment opens with the words “Congress shall make no law.” But what happens when corporations gain just as much or more power than Congress to curtail free speech? Though conservatives and liberals protest censorship by companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, two recent cases suggest the courts don’t want to see the First Amendment applied to Big Tech anytime soon.

At first, Gerald Groff’s supervisors accommodated his request not to deliver mail on Sundays because of his evangelical Christian faith. But then the U.S. Postal Service entered into a contract with Amazon, agreeing to deliver the online retailer’s packages on Sunday, and Groff’s accommodation ended. Supervisors levied progressively harsh discipline on him for failing to show up for work on the Sabbath, and he eventually resigned in January 2019 after about seven years of working as a mail carrier in Lancaster, Pa.

A federal appeals court on Thursday said a 34-foot cross in a Florida public park will not have to come down after all. The court reversed its earlier decision after the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back for another look. The cross’s 75-year presence in Pensacola’s Bayview Park doesn’t violate the establishment clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, ending a challenge by four atheists.

The Orlando Sentinel is campaigning against school choice in Florida by accusing Christian schools of anti-LGBT discrimination. A Jan. 23 article in the central Florida newspaper portrayed private, Christian K-12 schools in the state as “anti-gay,” suggesting they should no longer receive state tuition vouchers.