From Guns to Church, Emergency Virus Measures Test Core Rights

State and local efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus with stay-at-home and lockdown orders have spurred a libertarian backlash driving sometimes armed demonstrators to the streets and lawyers into courthouses across the U.S. to file civil rights lawsuits.

Aimed at freeing religious congregations and businesses from restrictions imposed in the name of protecting public health, the suits assert violations of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of freedom to publicly assemble, to worship, to bear arms, and not be stripped of one’s property interests without due process, rights their proponents assert must be preserved even if the countervailing risk is ...