Goodbye masks, hello full bars: California lifts Covid rules in ‘grand reopening’
Bars at full capacity. No masks for vaccinated Disneyland goers. Fans sitting side-by-side at Giants and Dodgers games.
California rolled back its major public health restrictions on Tuesday, 15 months after it became the first state in the US to shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
At the stroke of midnight, the state lifted most of its restrictions on social distancing and capacity limits. Vaccinated residents can now go without masks in most settings, with some exceptions – including on public transit, in healthcare facilities, homeless shelters and prisons, and indoors in K-12 schools and childcare facilities, since young children still have not been vaccinated.
The move has been billed as a “grand reopening”, and comes at a moment of optimism for a state that was once squarely in the pandemic’s destructive path.
“This is the lifeline. This is what we’ve been waiting for,” said Brett Winfield, the operations director for Pouring with Heart, a company that runs nearly 20 bars in Los Angeles.
The relaxing of public health rules about social distancing, patron numbers and mask wearing are “incredibly significant”, Winfield said. “It’s almost impossible to make enough money to run an effective and profitable business at 50% capacity for restaurants, and up to 25% capacity for bars.”
Venues were expecting a big increase in patrons starting Tuesday night, he said. “I think a lot of people were just literally waiting for the government to say, ‘It’s OK.’”
Speaking on the eve of the reopening, California’s governor painted a bright picture of the summer ahead. “With all due respect, eat your heart out, the rest of the United States,” said Gavin Newsom. “The state is not just poised to recover, it’s poised to come roaring back.”
In San Francisco’s Mission district, one of the city’s hardest-hit neighbourhoods, bar owner Gillian Fitzgerald said she was expecting a serious crowd this evening.
“I just know that a normal person that would never go out on a Tuesday will be going out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for a few weeks,” said Fitzgerald, who runs Casements, a popular bar that opened only a few months before Covid struck.
The changes are being welcomed by many business owners who have struggled to keep themselves afloat. At a virtual town hall on 10 June explaining the reopening rules, Los Angeles public health officials were encouraging: yes, you can reopen your nightclub. Yes, customers can serve themselves from buffets again. While unvaccinated people are still required to wear masks indoors, officials explained, businesses are allowed to implement an honor system, letting customers selfattest to being vaccinated. Those that prefer to continue requiring masks, or to create a system to check vaccination status, can also do so.
From success story to hotspot and back again
Pandemic highs and lows saw California go from an early success story to the US center of the virus. As the first in the country to impose a statewide shutdown in March 2020, California’s businesses were just starting to reopen last June when cases started rising and restrictions were imposed again.
A darker reality soon set in as California hurtled toward a deadly winter. At the height of its surge, Los Angeles faced overflowing ICUs and two Covid deaths every hour. More people have tested positive for the virus in California (3.8 million and counting) and more people have died (63,000 plus) than anywhere else in the country, although the nation’s most populous state had a lower per-capita death rate than most others.
Now, thanks in part to an effective vaccine rollout and high rates of adoption, California has achieved one of the lowest Covid rates in the country. At least 70% of adults have now had at least one dose of the vaccine, and officials have been slowly easing restrictions since the spring.
Recent months have seen more diners and shoppers venturing out, schools and offices reopening, and many hoping that life in the Golden State is getting closer to some kind of normal.
In the Mission, Casements seized the opportunity to expand outdoors in both directions, adding sidewalk tables out front and building out a charming patio in back. What was once an uninviting parking structure now feels like a backstage area at a music festival. Still, Fitzgerald and her staff are most excited not to have to police patrons to stay in line with public-health guidelines.
“Now people are free to order at the bar, free to dance, free to mingle, and that makes our lives easier,” she said. “A big part of my relief is that I don’t have to be the bad guy any more.”
In the nearby Castro district, the venerable diner Orphan Andy’s has served a largely LGBTQ+ clientele for decades, with one terminus of San Francisco’s famed F-Market streetcar just outside. That line’s fleet of heritage rolling stock only returned in mid-May after a 14-month absence, and Michael England – who has worked at Orphan Andy’s since it opened more than 40 years ago – has noticed a difference.
“Business has been on the upswing,” he said. “It started out pretty slow, and it’s increasing every week. We actually are expecting a boom for Pride Week. I’m finding that there are a lot of tourists in town.”
Months earlier, Orphan Andy’s won praise for an inventive approach to keeping its patrons safe: installing elaborate Lucite partitions to keep closeset vintage tables isolated. They’re gone now.
“The mandate is not there any more,” England said.
While San Francisco has registered fewer than 40,000 cases and a comparatively low 550 deaths, the Latino community in the Mission suffered disproportionately. Still, signs of cautious optimism were abundant in a neighborhood filled with essential workers. At La Victoria, a bakery that has served pan dulce and other Mexican treats for more than 70 years, Jacqueline Hernandez remained masked as she worked behind the counter. Her panadería has been open the entire time, she noted, and only now benefiting from gradually increased ridership through the Bart station one block away.
Business was “pretty good, actually”, Hernandez said, adding that she expected it to improve further as the city reopened in earnest today. “That’s what we’re hoping.”
San Francisco has immunized more than 70% of its eligible population, and even sites in pandemic-ravaged zip codes are seeing fewer people in need. Across the street from La Victoria bakery is a vaccine clinic that largely serves people of color in and around the Mission.
“When we opened up, we were doing 500 vaccinations a day,” said Diane Jones, a nurse and community ambassador who credits the city’s relative success with Covid to its experience serving marginalized communities during the HIV/Aids pandemic. “That was all first doses. I’m looking at yesterday and we vaccinated 144. Of those, 41 were same-day appointments, so people just dropped in. That tells you the capacity we have.”
‘Excited to be back’
Public health officials and state leaders have continued to stress that the reopening doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. The state’s rollback comes as the US marked 600,000 deaths from Covid-19 and as vaccination rates nationwide have slowed, raising fears the country will struggle to reach widespread immunity.
Newsom has rolled out a series of lotteries for vaccinated residents in the hopes of encouraging more people to get their shots.
And not all areas of the state are trending in a positive direction. Northern California, a region that has forcefully pushed back against mask mandates and other restrictions, has recently experienced a troubling rise in cases and hospitalization.
Many question if the honor system for mask wearing will work, including the California Nurses Association, which said the new rules essentially call on businesses and essential workers to be the vaccination police.
“This is not a sound public health strategy,” said Sandy Rending, a president of the association, which is calling on residents to keep masking up indoors and in crowds.
Still, a sense of cautious enthusiasm for the future was palpable on Tuesday.
Just before noon, La Cita bar, a downtown institution in Los Angeles, quietly opened its doors for the first time since 15 March 2020. Owner Carl Lofgren said he felt “a combination of excitement and panic”.
Within minutes, a line had formed. At the very front of the line was Brian, 58, who said he was ducking into the bar while on lunch break from working downtown, and declined to give his last name.
He had missed the people at La Cita, and said he was eager to hear updates on their lives. One of the bartenders had just gotten married before the pandemic closed the bar. Another had been planning to buy a house. What was happening now?
Further down, Heather Flores, 31, waited with five longtime friends. Her group had used to meet up at least once a month to celebrate birthdays and good news, but this was the first bar meetup they had had in more than a year. “I’m just excited to be back,” she said.
Around 12.30, more than a dozen people filed into the bar at last. “Woohoo!” one cheered.
About 10 minutes later, Brian walked out again. He had had one beer, he said, and now had to go back to his desk.
“Damn, it looks good in there,” he said.
People are free to order at the bar, free to dance, free to mingle, and that makes our lives easier
Gillian Fitzgerald, bar owner
Thousands of Southern Baptists from across the US are heading to Tennessee this week to vote for their next president, a choice laced with tension that could push America’s largest evangelical Christian denomination even further to the right and potentially spark an exodus of Black pastors and congregations.
Each of the three leading candidates for president presents a unique vision for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and will help guide the Protestant denomination through the thorny issues it currently faces – declining membership, deep divisions over acknowledging the existence of systemic racism and fresh accusations of mishandling sexual abuse allegations.
The denomination, which is more socially conservative than the general American public on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, would become even more politically aligned with Republican party if it were to elect the Georgia pastor Mike Stone as its next president. On the other side, the Alabama pastor Ed Litton has called for more distance from politics, and has the support of prominent Black Southern Baptists, who are part of a minority group that has been crucial in shoring up the SBC’s dwindling membership. Landing somewhere between Litton and Stone is the seminary president Albert Mohler, a former “Never Trumper” who endorsed Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign.
Barry Hankins, a historian at Baylor University who studies evangelicalism, said that the SBC seems to be going through an “identity crisis”.
“There is a strong faction that wants to be in lock step with the culture wars of the Republican party and a smaller group that wants to maintain a more independent witness within American culture,” he said.
Southern Baptist messengers, who represent their churches at the meeting, can only vote for the next president by being physically present on the convention floor. After last year’s meeting was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than 16,000 people plan to attend the 15-16 June conference at Nashville’s Music City Center, which would make the event the SBC’s biggest annual meeting in 25 years.
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The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 by pro-slavery Baptists in the south who believed it was moral for missionaries to own slaves. Despite this history, SBC missionary efforts since the 1950s have seen the number of Black churches in the denomination slowly increase, with a growth spurt after 1995, when the denomination apologized for condoning slavery and systemic racism.
Today, 14 million members attend the SBC’s network of more than 47,000 churches. Though the number of Black churches in the SBC is still relatively small, reaching nearly 3,400 in 2020, the SBC has been so successful at planting churches in communities of color or recruiting existing non-white congregations that – even though the number of white churches is declining sharply – the denomination’s non-white churches have been growing.
Jéan Ward, a 49-year-old Black Southern Baptist pastor and church planter from Atlanta, first joined the SBC about 10 years ago, attracted by its commitment to evangelization in urban areas. He told the Guardian that other church planting networks he had worked with didn’t give him the resources and autonomy he needed to start a successful church plant in the Atlanta communities he was seeking to reach.
“I love the fact that within the Southern Baptist Convention, when it comes to mission, they hands down the work together with that, even though there are some variances that happen,” Ward said.
However, the tensions emerging at the upcoming annual meeting suggest that some white Southern Baptists believe that acknowledging these new members’ views and life experiences threatens the SBC’s dominant culture – which is still overwhelmingly white and conservative.
As white evangelical Protestants become increasingly tied to the Republican party, they have come to expect their churches to align with their political ideology. One of the issues that has been seized on by prominent conservative commentators and politicians – and will probably be a key issue for many of the messengers flocking to Nashville – is critical race theory (CRT), a lens through which scholars seek to understand how systemic racism persists despite the legal victories of the civil rights era.
Donald Trump lashed out at CRT in a memo last September, ordering federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege.(Joe Biden rescinded that ban shortly after taking office.) More than 20 states have recently introduced or passed legislation to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools.
At the last annual meeting, Southern Baptists addressed the theory by passing a resolution, a non-binding statement that acts as a powerful symbol.
The statement on CRT, known as Resolution 9, affirmed that Southern Baptists seeking to address social ills don’t need to turn to anything but the Bible for guidance. At the same time, it stated that CRT can be a useful tool with which to analyze human experiences.
The resolution acknowledging CRT’s usefulness prompted a backlash. Stone, the Georgia pastor running for president, has the endorsement of the Conservative Baptist Network, a group formed last year in response to concerns that the SBC is caving to “worldly ideologies” such as CRT.
Stone has proposed a resolution for the annual meeting that unequivocally condemns CRT, calling the framework “neo-Marxist” and “incompatible with scripture”. He said earlier this year: “Our Lord isn’t woke.”
Ward believes the rejection of CRT discounts the lived experiences of Black Americans who have had to work harder to achieve the same successes as their white cohorts. CRT isn’t creating new divisions, but pointing out those that already exist, the pastor said.
“One of the worst things you can say to a person is, ‘I don’t see color,’” Ward said. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see my identity.”
Ward, who is also the executive director of the African American Fellowship for the Georgia Baptist Convention, said an anti-CRT resolution could threaten the SBC’s recent success in recruiting existing Black churches into the fold and planting new churches in Black communities. Several prominent Black pastors have recently disaffiliated from the denomination over the issue. While Ward isn’t planning to leave if an anti-CRT resolution passes, he said a few Black pastors in Georgia are talking about doing just that.
An anti-CRT resolution would mark “the beginning of the end of the SBC”, Ward warned. He also suggested that it could have repercussions outside the denomination.
“I honestly believe this is a political move so that critical race theory can be killed on a national level,” Ward said. “If churches are saying CRT is ungodly and shouldn’t be adhered to, that then affects decision makers that lead corporations, who will then push it that way.”
Mohler, president of Kentucky’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has shown a willingness to acknowledge historical racism, commissioning a report in 2018 documenting his seminary’s past ties to white supremacy and slavery. But the report didn’t include plans to rectify or collectively repent for the seminary’s racist past. Mohler has also spoken out against CRT, initiating a joint statement with five other SBC presidents last November that prohibited professors from teaching students about the theory. That statement from the seminary presidents – who are all white – drew heavy criticism from several Black Southern Baptist leaders.
Litton, however, signed a statement last December acknowledging that systemic injustice is real and urging “collective repentance”. He has the support of Fred Luter, the SBC’s first and only Black president.
Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist and the executive director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center, said he was hopeful that Southern Baptists would listen to the concerns of Black leaders at the annual meeting. Failing to do so could have serious consequences, he said.
“I think if the SBC comes out with a resolution or a president seen as not listening to the concerns of African Americans, you may see a significant exodus of them from the convention,” Stetzer said.
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CRT is not the only issue likely to be debated at the convention. In May, another prominent figure in the denomination, Bible teacher Beth Moore, announced that she no longer considered herself Southern Baptist. For years, Moore had been calling out misogyny within SBC circles and advocating for survivors of sexual abuse. She has also faced backlash from fellow Baptists for preaching to mixed audiences of men and women.
While Southern Baptists affirm that women have key roles to play in the church, the denomination’s core doctrinal statement insists that the Bible does not allow women to serve as pastors. The ban on female pastors was added in 2000, with Mohler’s support. This position was recently challenged by one of the largest SBC churches, California’s Saddleback Church, which ordained three women as staff pastors in May.
Mohler, Stone and Litton all agree that the ordination of female pastors contradicts core Southern Baptist doctrine. Mohler even claimed women pastors are the reason for declining membership of liberal churches.
“Liberal theology is the kiss of death for any church or denomination,” Mohler told Religion News Service in May. “Little remains but social justice activism and deferred maintenance.”
Whether or not Saddleback will be disfellowshipped from the SBC for ordaining women remains up to messengers to the annual meeting, Mohler added.
The problem of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up within the denomination has toppled several prominent leaders. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle documented hundreds of credible accusations against SBC pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers – some of whom eventually found jobs at different churches.
Calls for accountability emerged again this year after letters written by Russell Moore, former head of the SBC’s public policy arm, were leaked online. (Russell Moore and Beth Moore are not related.)
One letter suggested that the SBC’s executive committee, which runs the business of the convention, had resisted reforms and bullied an abuse survivor. Russell Moore specifically called out Stone, the committee’s chairman at the time, for delaying reforms in a closed-door meeting in May 2019. Russell Moore resigned from his position at the denomination’s public policy arm in May and appears to have left the SBC altogether.
Stone, who says he is a survivor of sexual abuse himself, has called Moore’s accusations “slanderous”, “ungodly” and “outrageous”. On Thursday, leaked audio recordings from that meeting appeared to corroborate Russell Moore’s accusation that executive committee leaders prioritized the denomination’s image over abuse survivors’ concerns. In response to the leaks, the executive committee announced it had hired a firm to perform an independent review of its handling of sexual abuse issues. Some survivors are still concerned about whether the investigation will be truly independent from the executive committee’s control.
Christa Brown, a longtime advocate for abuse survivors in Baptist circles, said she did not have faith in the SBC’s ability to address the issue.
“The juxtaposition of nice-sounding talk with a lack of any care or action feels duplicitous and lessens any possibility of trust,” Brown said. “It is yet another way of being re-victimized and exploited.”
In a statement, Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s current president, said: “The Convention was – and still is – divided over methods of response to sexual abuse. However, the SBC is not divided on the priority of caring for abuse survivors and protecting the vulnerable in our churches.”
Stetzer believes the election, resolutions and motions that emerge from this year’s annual meeting will determine the SBC’s future. He said it was
important for Southern Baptists to wade through these tough issues of race and abuse before concentrating on the church’s ultimate mission – evangelism.
“You have to deal with the bad before you can get to the things we want to focus on,” he said. “We have to address issues of abuse and poor leadership and simultaneously choose a path that enables us to hear out concerns about CRT while listening to the voices of African American leaders.”