Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

The coronavirus has forced state and local governments to make a number of public health decisions that have wound up in court. Among them: limiting the number of people who can attend events like weddings. In New York, how many people can attend a wedding has become an issue for federal judges to decide:

An upstate wedding with 175 on the guest list can go forward this weekend, despite a coronavirus mandate that limits nuptial gatherings to just 50 people, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Pamella Giglia and Joe Durolek filed suit last month, alongside since-married couple Jenna DiMartile and Justin Crawford, claiming that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive order limiting social gatherings to 50 people or less has been unfairly applied while protests, graduations and restaurants have all seen much larger groups.

They also claimed the order violated their First and 14th Amendment rights in not allowing them to carry out a religious wedding according to their conscience and beliefs.

DiMartile and Crawford’s wedding was allowed to proceed on Aug. 7 after the judge ruled in their favor just minutes before DiMartile walked down the aisle at the Sterling at Arrowhead Golf Club in Akron with around 115 guests looking on.

But following federal Judge Glenn Suddaby’s decision, the state filed an appeal and then asked Suddaby to hold off the Aug. 22 Giglia-Durolek wedding — which is also set to take place at the Arrowhead Golf Club — until the appellate court ruled.

Welcome to the brave new world of wedding planning, where not only the menu and seating charts are issues of great concern, but so, too, is getting a federal judge’s approval of the guest list.

Image Credit: Brian Turner / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)