Local governments have the right to restrict people’s movements to slow the spread of COVID-19, but they cannot place churches under harsher rules than other groups, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday. “Religious institutions must not be singled out for special burdens,” he said in a statement warning the U.S. Department of Justice would protect Americans’ freedom of worship from unfair restrictions.

Petitions, ballot initiatives, and referendums have often served as tools for voters who feel unheard by legislators to take democracy into their own hands. A voter-driven ballot initiative in 2018 enshrined unborn children’s right to life in the Alabama Constitution, for example.

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.

While church leaders across the United States scrambled to organize online worship services in mid-March, pastor Rodney Howard-Browne told a large crowd gathered in his Tampa church why he would never cancel public gatherings: “This Bible school is open because we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.”

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.

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.

A federal appeals court last week overturned a 2017 lower court decision that barred two Christian high schools in Florida from using a stadium’s public-address system for a pregame prayer.