Liberty and anarchy are two very different things

During the Carter administration, a peace demonstrator at the White House carried a sign which read, “Nothing Is Worth Dying For.”

Unlike most signs carried at protests and demonstrations, that one drew a great deal of attention. Someone pointed out that if nothing is worth dying for, then neither is anything worth living for. I would guess that the young man who carried that sign hadn’t thought his slogan through that far. People who are caught up in movements often don’t.

Being a history buff, I’ve long been aware of the White Rose, a group of idealistic German students who opposed the Nazi regime. Hans and Sophie Scholl are the best-known of the many members of the group who paid for their courage with their lives. The Scholl siblings were guillotined for passing out anti-Hitler leaflets at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich.

The leaflets were slapdash, typewritten, and mimeographed affairs, and it’s easy to see them as naive and futile gestures. It’s hard to see what practical effect they could possibly have had. But practicality was beside the point. They said things that needed to be said:

Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?

and

Since the conquest of Poland, 300,000 Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!

The White Rose bore witness. Like the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square, its members stood in the way of totalitarian terror and shouted, “Stop!” Many of its members paid with their lives. They considered what they had to say worth dying for. And bearing witness against the Nazi nightmare gave their lives meaning, as well as their deaths. Few of us will lead lives as worth the living as Hans and Sophie Scholl.

Just today, I became aware of another youthful resistance group in Nazi Germany with a floral name. It was far more practically oriented and far larger. Many of its members, too, paid for their defiance of the regime with their lives. Its members, too, said “no!” to coercion and terror. But without denigrating the individual sacrifices of the Edelweißpiraten (“Edelweiss Pirates”), their agenda wasn’t quite as lofty.

The Edelweißpiraten weren’t protesting the Holocaust or the other crimes of the German government. They simply were opposed to compulsion in principle. They didn’t like being told what to do. Again, without diminishing the courage of its individual members, some of whom were just as nobly motivated as the members of the White Rose, the program of the Edelweiss Pirates as a group boiled down to words which needn’t be chiseled into granite on any monument: “You can’t make me!” Some had no particular political or moral agenda at all. They simply didn’t want to be told what to do.

Sometimes a thin line can separate principle and childishness. None of us likes to be told what to do. But the grownups among us not only are willing to be told what to do in certain areas but insist on it. Any thoughtful adult realizes that rules are necessary for any group to function in a peaceful and constructive way and that without laws that restrict individual liberty, civilization itself would be impossible.

“You can’t make me!” might almost be America’s national slogan. ” Liberty!” was the battle-cry of the American Revolution, and when Baron von Steuben came here from Prussia to train George Washington’s army, he nearly despaired. How can an effective army ever be built, he wondered, when the soldiers who comprised it refused to follow an order unless the reason for it was explained first, and they agreed with it?

But follow orders they did- and disobedience was duly punished. Although the first Continental soldier to be condemned for cowardice and desertion, Ebeneezer Leffingwell, received an eleventh-hour pardon from Washington because of his “previous good character,” the general warned that those who emulated Leffingwell in the future would be shot. And they were.

Washington did not hesitate to order the compulsory vaccination of his soldiers against smallpox, a precedent that seems to be lost on a great many contemporary Americans, including certain Republican governors. And the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that compulsory lockdowns and quarantines as public health measures lie well within the constitutional authority of states under the Tenth Amendment. In fact, the principle is so well established in American law- and has been, since the earliest days of the Republic- that it’s difficult to take the odd claim that quarantines and lockdowns and vaccine mandates violate individual rights seriously. Such objections are really more on the order of a childish, petulant “You can’t make me!”

The idea that there is somehow a constitutional right to endanger the health of others- and thus their rights- by refusing both vaccination and reasonable restrictions on their movements and activities if they decline to be vaccinated would be a hard one to defend from the writings of the Founders or the history of American constitutional law. Far from being somehow a violation of the principles of liberty, “vaccine passports” are not only reasonable, at least in principle, but well established in legal precedent as constitutionally legitimate tools in times of pandemic. In fact, in 1824, John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States, made the parenthetical observation in Gibbons vs. Ogden, a case involving maritime rights, that quarantine laws “form a portion of that immense mass of legislation which embraces everything within the territory of a state not surrendered to the general government.” If, for religious or other reasons, an individual declines vaccination, fine. But in such a case it falls well within the authority of the state to quarantine that person for the sake of the public good, a point which the Supreme Court has acknowledged ever since the days of John Marshall!

Why are we even debating this?

Are mandates and lockdowns and quarantines necessary? Are they prudent? Nobody argues that unnecessary restrictions on the bodily autonomy or movements of American citizens are legitimate or desirable. But whether they are necessary or prudent in any specific case is a medical question rather than a legal one, to be answered by epidemiologists rather than by lawyers, judges, and politicians. And despite the ongoing attempt by COVID-minimizers to exaggerate the very small number of medical professionals who dissent from it, and often their credentials, the consensus of the medical experts is firmly on the side of their use, at least in general principle, and has been ever since the pandemic began.

Granted, it’s inevitable that a society that places as much emphasis on individual liberty as ours, there should be a perennial debate about its limits. Tom Paine railed against taxation, for example. Even Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” But the courts have consistently upheld the power of taxation, despite the healthy suspicion of its use by conservatives ever since the foundation of the Republic. The reason is obvious. George Washington put it well: “It is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.” James Madison, the author of the Constitution, wrote, “The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.”

But perhaps the most relevant quotation of all comes from Benjamin Franklin: “Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us.  We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”

One of the “taxes” we have paid in this pandemic has been laid upon us by folly, levied through our slowness to embrace and implement sensible and reasonable public health measures in the face of what is now the deadliest pandemic in the nation’s history. We have paid it in the lives of friends, neighbors, and relatives, at the present moment about 837,000 of them. The number of deaths we suffered in the Civil War is not precisely documented, but it seems to have been somewhere around 750,000. During this pandemic, America has matched and exceeded the butcher’s bill for the deadliest war we’ve ever fought, and in half the time. Yet amazingly, there are those who continue to minimize the pandemic and resist common-sense measures whose constitutionality is established beyond any reasonable doubt on the ground that they violate “individual liberty!”

There is a difference between a prudent suspicion of heavy-handed government (and there can be no doubt that in some cases the government has been heavy-handed in its handling of this pandemic) and what the British call “bloody-mindedness.” There is a difference between a proper concern for the preservation of our legitimate rights and the selfish, unreasonable assertion of the “right” to compromise the rights of others.

Those who strive to preserve individual freedom against arbitrary and unnecessary government restrictions are worthy of praise. But it seems to me that modern libertarianism- and conservatism generally- more and more frequently mistake principled resistance to tyranny with a petulant, childish whine of “You can’t make me!.” Sometimes, as was the case with the White Rose and the Edelweiss Pirates, people and movements find themselves fighting the good fight side by side. But that doesn’t mean that their motivations are identical, equally thoughtful, or equally valid. To be an extremist and a selfish jerk is not the same thing as being a freedom fighter!

A liberal society (in the broad, Enlightenment sense of the term “liberal”) seeks to strike the optimum balance between protecting individual rights from being violated by an overbearing government, and from being violated by other individuals. Achieving that balance requires a clear understanding that, as someone once said, “You have every right in the world to swing your fist- but only until it comes into contact with my nose.”

And to refuse to be vaccinated without taking measures to avoid exposing others to a virus one may be carrying without even knowing it is to make firm contact with the nose of others. Not only is it to risk being a personal vector of infection, but it also means keeping us further from reaching herd immunity and giving the virus further opportunity to spread and evolve. True, the Omicron variant seems to be less deadly than previous iterations of the virus, but it’s also far more contagious and seems to have made some progress toward making our vaccines less effective.

Contrary to what many of us seem to think, “I don’t wanna, and you can’t make me” isn’t really the same thing as “Give me liberty or give me death!” License and liberty are entirely different animals. Speaking theologically, human government is fallen, potentially dangerous, and worthy of suspicion not because it’s government, but because it’s human.

But individuals are also potentially dangerous, and also worthy of suspicion because they, too, are human, and therefore fallen. My political faith tells me that the Constitution has invested in the individual the authority to serve as a check on the fallen, human government. But my religious faith, on the basis of Romans 13, tells me that in His wisdom God has instituted the government as a check on the fallen, human, individual.

To lose the proper balance between the two is to risk either tyranny on one hand, or anarchy on the other. And human rights evaporate just as quickly under the one as under the other.

ADDENDUM: The Supreme Court has struck down President Biden’s requirement that employees of large businesses either be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing by a vote of 6-3. It did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers by a worrisome margin of only 5-4.

Given the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, I’m not surprised. But I guess it just goes to show that conservative justices are just as liable as liberal ones to allow controversial political debates to cloud their reading of the Constitution.

ADDENDUM II: Or not. The Court did uphold the mandate for healthcare workers, and the Tenth Amendment argument is predicated on the authority to quarantine and to utilize other restrictive measures in times of pandemic being vested in the states and not in the Federal government.

A very strong case can be made that the United States led the world in COVID deaths during too long a period (a nation with four percent of the world’s population- the most scientifically advanced nation in the world- for quite a while had 20% of the world’s COVID deaths) because while every other industrialized democracy on Earth was undertaking a coordinated nationwide effort to control the pandemic, we had a president who claimed that the virus was no worse than the flu, would mysteriously vanish overnight, and to the extent that it was worth addressing at all was an issue for the states alone. In the process, Mr. Trump ignored the obvious Federal role in coordinating the efforts of the individual states, even to the point of mismanaging the allocation of equipment and supplies under Federal control, arguing that it wasn’t the Federal government’s problem. The degree to which a worldwide (and therefore nationwide) pandemic demands a greater role for the Federal government is a matter worth debating, even to the point of asking whether the Federal government’s mandate in the Preamble to the Constitution to “promote the general welfare” might not in extraordinary circumstances modify the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of such powers to the states. But thinking the matter through, I have to admit that the Court’s ruling in the matter of the Biden mandate for the employees of large companies is in accord with precedent after all.

I would argue that the mandate itself was a matter of common sense. But a strong case can be made that under the Tenth Amendment, it’s something the states rather than the Federal government should address.

Again, we face the troublesome difficulty presented by our living in a smaller world in the Twenty-First Century than the one in which the Constitution was written, in which commerce is global and the automobile and the jet plane have replaced the horse and carriage and the wind-powered ship. Worldwide pandemics weren’t the threat in 1789 that they are today; even viruses had a harder time traveling back then. What once were national problems are now global ones, and what were once local and state problems now have national and even worldwide implications. As an adherent of Antonin Scalia’s “dead Constitution” philosophy, which sees the Court’s role as interpreting the words of the Constitution as written rather than adapting them to a changing world, I actually have a certain amount of theoretical sympathy for what apparently was the Court’s reasoning.

Maybe amendment is the answer. Maybe the Federal government needs explicit constitutional authority to deal with matters which in the modern world are as national as they are local, if not more so. But I have to think that the extraordinary situation posed by COVID justifies the view that “promoting the general welfare” in a nationwide epidemiological crisis implies Federal authority under the Constitution to act even in a realm that historically has been seen as the purview of the states.

A truly warped concept of “freedom-” and ethics

Leaving aside the fact that nowhere in the Constitution, in the history of classic American political theory, in the law, or in any respected ethical or theological tradition is there a right to infect others with a deadly virus as a matter of personal freedom, the time has come to stop coddling people who permit and even excuse things like this.

We need vaccine passports, especially in schools; mask mandates where necessary (certainly including schools in areas of high transmission, if the schools are open at all) and those who find these to be violations of their own sensibilities should be invited to join Tucker Carlson and emigrate to Hungary or other truly authoritarian states. This is what you can expect of the kind of people with enough chutzpah and little enough ability to reason from (a) to (b) that they can claim to simultaniously be disciples of Ayn Rand and of Jesus Christ. What in God’s name have we come to when we value illusory, sociopathic “freedom” to selfishly refuse to take simple, common sense public measures above he lives of human beings? And yes, children can indeed get COVID- and get very sick and even die from it. The Delta variant is just as contagious as chickenpox or Ebola. We were on the verge of eliminating COVID in the United States. And now we’re letting the chance slip between our fingers.

At this point, it’s a self-inflicted pandemic

Way back when the pandemic was first gathering steam, The Federalist ran a bizarre article by a doctor (a non-practicing, currently unlicensed dermatologist, as I recall) advocating the recruitment of young, healthy adults to voluntarily become infected with COVID-19 so as to defeat the virus via natural herd immunity– i.e., by getting a large enough percentage of the population infected, recovered, and theoretically immune that that virus couldn’t retain a footload in the population. The headline went further and actually advocated “chicken pox parties” such as parents often schedule to get their kids exposed to that harmless childhood disease! Clearly, the staff at The Federalist had no idea what they were talking about when addressing the subject of COVID-19! And they still don’t.

Neither, it seems obvious, does the Republican Party or the far right in general.

The article was so outrageous that Twitter temporarily suspended The Federalist’s account.While I suppose the guy who wrote it deserves points for thinking outside the box, it was a ridiculous idea because it overlooked three things.

First, while the death rate for COVID-19 isn’t huge (currently 1.8% in the United States, largely though not entirely restricted to the elderly, the obese, and those with underlying health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes), it was already one of the most contagious viruses we’d encountered from its very first iteration. It has become significantly more contagious with each mutation; the currently endemic Delta variant is about 50% more contagious than the Alpha varient, which in turn was about 50% more contagious than the original. The contageon of the Delta variant of the virus is approximately the same as that of chicken pox. In that sense, if in no other, the article in The Federalist corresponds to reality.

Fewer than two deaths out of a hundred doesn’t sound like much. But while the COVID minimizers have been so fixated on the mortality rate that they haven’t noticed it, COVID-19 has infected 34,672,690 Americans at last count, and killed more Americans than died in both world wars in only two years. The COVID pandemic (613,223 American deaths) is closing in on the 1918 Spanish Flu (675,000 American deaths) and perhaps even the the Civil War (likely 750,000, though only 620,000 are documented) as the deadliest event in American history, and in half the time it took the Civil War to get there!

BTW, the same system is used in computing deaths due to COVID as has always been used in gathering such statistics. Only where a person who had multiple causes of death would probably not have died except for their having COVID is it given as a “cause of death.” The lie to the contrary has been spread very widely and continues to be widely repeated.

But still, the radical right doesn’t see the problem. It’s still ignoring- and slandering- the CDC and people like Dr. Fauci. It points out that their advice keeps changing, apparently unable to follow the rather obvious point that the best available advice changes as we learn more about this new virus.

Only a few months ago, we seemed to be on the verge of having COVID on the run, at least in the United States. But human stupidity- and yes, sometimes simply a lack of information, or the bad habit many of us have formed of listening to crackpots rather than the experts- has torpedoed that. We spent all that time and effort “flattening the curve” until a vaccine was available. With the original virus, if we got to the point where 70% of the population had either been vaccinated or had the disease, we might well have reached herd immunity- the point at which there were not enough vulnerable people left for the virus to survive.

But that’s water under the bridge. With the emergence of the Delta variant and its vastly increased contageon, it would probably take 80%-90%. And that would be doable- if we could get 80% to 90% of the population vaccinated.

But after an initially positive response, the rate at which Americans are being vaccinated has hit a brick wall. The Biden Administration had hoped to have 80% of the country vaccinated by this point, effectively ending the pandemic at least in the United States. Instead, 49.8% of us are fully vaccinated, and 57.7% have had even one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

There is some good news. 77.8% of those over 75 have been vaccinated, as have 81.8% of those aged 65-74. 67.3 of those 50-64% are protected. But only 57.8% of those in their 40s have had both shots, but only 48.7% of those 25-39 have gotten the vaccine, as have only 48.3% of those 18-24.

Those most at risk of death because of age are mostly protected, though a significant minority remains vulnerable. We have no statistics to tell us how many of those suffering from health conditions ranging from obesity through diabetes through heart disease and compromised immune systems remain unvaccinated. We know that age and underlying medical conditions generally- though by no means always- are contributing factors in COVID deaths, so it isn’t surprising that immunization rates drop with age.

But that brings us to the second fatal flaw in the argument made by The Federalist article, one that seemingly has yet to sink in on the radical right: it is not only impossible but simply absurd to think of isolating either the unvaccinated elderly or the unvaccinated younger population from each other. It simply can’t be done. As long as fewer than 80-90% have either natural immunity or have been vaccinated, the virus will continue to circulate in the unvaccinated population and will continue to mutate into still more contageous forms.

The current outbreak of the Delta variant, which is more deadly as well as significantly more contageous, is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I can’t quite bring myself to adopt the attitude many people with an otherwise rational attitude toward the virus have embraced that because it is almost exclusively the unvaccinated who are going to die, the next phase of the pandemic is “natural seletion in action,” killing only those whose own foolishness has left them vulnerable. For one thing, that isn’t true; there are many people who haven’t been vaccinated for logistical reasons, and a huge percentage of the unvaccinated publication has been confused by the propaganda and misinformation being spread by irresponsible people and media like The Federalist, Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, and the far-right blogosphere. Vaccine hesitancy is my no means the exclusive domain of the willfully ignorant. People who have been deceived by extremists do not deserve to die for it, or even to get sick.

A great deal of vaccine hesitency seems to be based on the fact that the CDC has only granted emergency authorization to the vaccines. For some inexplicable reason it has not yet permanently and definitively certified them as safe. That fact is hard to understand. At this point the evidence that the vaccines are safe is overwhelming. Not only have huge clinical trials been conducted with favorable results (contrary to the propaganda of #TeamVirus), but close to half of the American people have received them, almost entirely without ill-effects and with overwhelming evidence of their extreme effectiveness. Experts estimate that the Pfizer vaccine, for example, while over 90% effective against previous iterations of the virus, is still 88% effective against the Delta variant. But in actual practice, the “breakthrough cases” in which fully vaccinated people come down with even mild cases of COVID represent fewer than one-tenth of one percent of the vaccinated population. And even among those cases, death or serious illness is vanishingly rare. Clearly full approval of the vaccines is being held up by bureaucratic red tape, not by actual concerns about their safety or effectiveness. Up to a third of the unvaccinated population says that it would consider being vaccinated in full approval was given. There is no excuse for the delay. The CDC needs to get its case together and issue that approval. It is a public health necessity, and again, there is no reasonable doubt that it would be justified.

And while children rarely die from COVID, some do. Fewer than 15% of those under 18 have been fully vaccinated. Of course, the CDC has yet to approve the vaccination of children, either, although that approval is supposed to be close.

As long as we remain below the 90% threshold required for herd immunity, the pandemic will continue, even though its worst ravages will be restricted to those who have voluntarily refused the vaccine. They are correct in saying that they have every right to continue to refuse. But as the saying goes, one person’s right to swing his fist ends at the point of another person’s nose. There is no right to spread a deadly disease, or to put others at risk.

The third thing The Federalist article missed is that there is precedent for the sensible steps the government has taken to protect us from COVID, and that unlike “chickenpox parties,” they are actually known to work. Ever since George Washington ordered the compulsory vaccination of the Continental Army against smallpox, the armed forces have required their members to receive mandatory vaccinations against a range of diseases. And every school child has to be vaccinated against a great many viruses already. The same is true of private employers. There is nothing new about vaccine mandates, and it’s not only silly but intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. There is no constitutional issue here; the matter is one of long-established precedent.

Quarrantines and lockdowns have a long history in America and other Western nations. They are reasonable and necssary public health measures which violate nobody’s rights. The ignorant may question their necessity, but when the evidence justifies them the government’s only responsible course is to issue them. And by the same logic, the government has every right and even the duty to require that people who can transmit a potentially deadly virus- and we now know that even vaccinated people who have mild break-through cases, as rare as they are, can do that- wear masks in close quarters indoors.

The CDC has recommended that due to the Delta variant outbreak spurred by the large percentage of Americans who have remained unvaccinated and made possible by their prevention of herd immunity, we all go back to wearing masks in such circumstances. We are mostly ignoring that advice. That is a tragic blunder that will cost lives. We are all sick and tired of this pandemic. But precisely for that reason, wouldn’t it make sense to engage in behavior that will get it over and done with rather than ignoring reasonable precautions and keeping it going?

For the same reason that quarantines and lockdowns are both constitutional and reasonable, so are “vaccine passports.” In my view, the government would be remiss in not making proof of vaccination mandatory for especially large gatherings of people, and especially for those who chose not to wear a mask. Again, there simply is no right to endanger somebody else’s life or health.

Finally, I recently came across a proposal that I think deserves serious consideration. It will, of course, be opposed by isolationists and “America First” types. Yet it is a perfect example of why that philosophy is not only misguided and foolish but hopelessly out of date. In the modern era, those two oceans no longer protect us from the rest of the world. Decry globalization as loudly as you want, but it’s an unavoidable consequence of modern technology.

The Third World is almost completely unvaccinated. There has been an outcry over the way the developed nations are “hogging” the vaccine for their own use. Certainly, any government has the health and safety of its own population as its first responsibility. But although I recognize that it would be hugely expensive and that we really can’t afford it, a strong case can be made that the United States should pay for vaccinating the world’s underdeveloped nations. I would argue that this is in our best interest for two reasons.

First, from a purely selfish point of view, as long as this virus is spreading and mutating unchecked anywhere in the world, it will continue to grow more deadly and more contageous. It doesn’t take much in the way of imagination to see the distinct possibility that a strain might develop against which our vacines are ineffective. In that case, only a fool would imagine that despite any and all precautions we might take, sooner or later it will manage to get into the United States. We will not be completely safe from this virus as long as it continues to spread and mutate anywhere,

Secondly, the international prestige of the United States s close to being at an all-time low. Though it increased somewhat with the election of President Biden, the damage to it done by his predecessor was massive and well-nigh incalculable. Though the Cold War is behind us, we remain in a struggle for world leadership and for the future of the planet with China, and to a lesser extent with Russia and with radical Islam.

I can think of nothing that would restore American prestige and strike a greater blow against the international influence of our enemies than saving the underdeveloped world from COVID. I don’t know whether do ing so would be practical and I do know that there are powerful economic arguments against it. But I also wonder how many aircraft carriers, sixth-generation fighters, and missiles we’d have to build at how great a cost to add as much to our national safety and security.

Good-will can be as powerful a weapon as the most advanced weaponry. We knew that once. Maybe it’s time to create some, if only because it’s in our own best interest.

As “pro-life” as a MIRVed ICBM

Appropos of yesterday’s post on the incredibly bad logic behind the radical right’s anti-vax rhetoric, Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark had a piece today on the “depraved indifference” of #TeamVirus’s campaign of disinformation and sociopathic posturing in opposition to the efforts of the Biden administration to get us to herd immunity and end this pandemic once and for all by getting enough people vaccinated.

This all started because Donald Trump a) popped off about another lunatic conspiracy theory that struck his fancy and, of course, refused to back down when it was shown to be nonsense, as usual; and b) recognized the economic impact of common-sense public health measures to control the pandemic, realized that it would destroy the healthy economy that was the only real argument for re-electing him, and placed a greater value on his own re-election than on human life.

The willingness of such a great percentage of American Christians to show themselves to be hypocrites by casting aside the very “pro-life” values they used as an excuse to support Trump if that was the cost of getting him re-elected is one of the great scandals of church history. This is not to say, of course, that every pro-Trump Christian is a conscious hypocrite about the sanctity of innocent human life. A great many just got carried away with the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates both sides of the political divide these days, and failed to think the matter through.

But there it is. This issue is a perfect illustration of why I cannot be a Republican any more, and why I have a difficult time understanding how anybody with a conscience and the ability to reason can go along with #TeamVirus, now that it doesn’t even have the excuse of saving Donald Trump’s political hide anymore.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead who would otherwise be alive because of this depraved, performative pretense that enabling the spread of a deadly virus is somehow a protection of “individual liberty.” One wonders how many unneccessary deaths will be necessary before people with an iota of ethical sensitivity wake up and smell the decomp.

Look. It doesn’t matter that COVID seems only to have a fatality rate of one percent. This is one of the most contageous viruses we’ve even had to deal with. Even with that comparatively low a fatality rate, it’s killed 600,000 Americans in a little over a year.

This isn’t rocket science. And it isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an ethical stain on a large percentage of the American people, and a cause of scandal for American Christianity,

One wonders how many more have to die.