Mask Bans? In Red States And ... New YORK? F*ck It, Jake, It's Crazy Town.
Sure, sure, to stop 'protests' and 'crime.'
The COVID virus is still very much with us, and for many medically vulnerable people whose immune systems don’t protect them from the virus, wearing a good mask is an absolute necessity when going out in public. That could get a bit more difficult, though, because as the Washington Post reports (gift link), several states are reviving pre-pandemic laws against wearing masks in public, supposedly to deter troublemakers from hiding their faces in protests of Israel’s war in Gaza. Or to deter criminals from doing crimes, also supposedly.
In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) recently vetoed a bill that would have made masking in public a criminal offense, but the Republican-majority Lege is likely to override it. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D)
said this month she supports legislative efforts to ban masks on the subway, citing an incident in which masked protesters on a train shouted: “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.”
Well Christ on a bike, that’s horrible and seems like it violates New York’s law against making a terroristic threat, but then, any First-Amendmenty thing like that is harder to prosecute than “were they wearing a mask? Y/N.”
I am not a lawyer, but it seems like that and a couple of similar incidents detailed in the article could be charged as disorderly conduct, masks or no.
But don’t worry, people with compromised immune systems and others trying to protect yourselves from respiratory viruses! Advocates for the revived bans insist you would have nothing to worry about from law enforcement, although maybe you’ll have to put up with some harassment from private citizens who went around coughing on you during the pandemic, to proclaim their freedom from wearing Fauci’s “slave muzzle,” to declare that a mask is just like a yellow star of David in Nazi Times, and to explain that child molesters love masks.
The problem is that little subtleties like “medical masks OK if you need one” often get ignored when everything is a fucking culture war, as the WaPo story points out:
The day after the North Carolina House of Representatives passed its anti-masking bill in June in response to pro-Palestinian protests at the University of North Carolina, Shari Stuart said a man confronted her for wearing a surgical mask when she walked into an auto service center in the Raleigh area to get an oil change. After she tried to explain that she has Stage 4 breast cancer and a weakened immune system, Stuart said, the man called her a “f---ing liberal” and insisted masks were now illegal. He later coughed on her and said he hoped the cancer would kill her.
It would seem that he did so without even disguising his face, so we aren’t sure a mask ban is much of a deterrent.
The bill — which remember, was not and is not a law yet — includes a provision allowing people to wear “a medical or surgical grade mask for the purpose of preventing the spread of contagious disease,” and as far as we can tell, you wouldn’t even need to carry a physician’s sworn statement or to submit immediately to medical testing to prove your claim if challenged, which is pretty generous really.
That didn’t reassure Ms. Stuart much, as the told the Post: “I’ve thought I should wear masks with something printed on it like ‘immune deficient’ or ‘cancer patient.’ But we should not have to do that.” Also, do not give the NC Lege ideas, please.
And of course, there’s the problem of sorting out protesters who have medical concerns from those who are just hiding their faces to avoid being identified, which might even lead to police beating the wrong protesters, or worse, not beating the protesters who need to be beaten. ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley said the mask ban “really sets up a situation where we are likely to see selective enforcement against protesters that the authorities don’t like,” as if that weren’t the whole point right there.
We imagine cops would probably explain that’s not a problem at all: Just pepper spray anyone wearing a mask, and then arrest the survivors, who clearly didn’t qualify for the exemption.
Republicans in the Lege, of course, aren’t worried that the law might be selectively enforced against people of color, largely because people of color are worried about that and that just proves that Critical Race Theory needs to be banned harder.
One of the North Carolina bill’s sponsors, Republican state Sen. Danny Earl Britt, reacted to Cooper’s veto with the sort of calm, dispassionate reason that has characterized so much public discourse since the pandemic, saying in a statement that
Bad actors have been using masks to conceal their identity when they commit crimes and intimidate the innocent. Instead of helping put an end to this threatening behavior, the governor wants to continue encouraging these thugs by giving them more time to hide from the consequences of their actions.
Also health exemptions, yadda yadda yadda, but mostly thugs.
The article also looks at the move to ban masking in New York, featuring Hochul saying, “We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior” (she too will protect “legitimate” health concerns yadda yadda). And NYC Mayor Eric Adams helpfully suggested businesses demand patrons pull down their masks when they come through the door, just to prove they are not hoodlums or so they can be caught on surveillance video.
Instead of banning masks, maybe increase the penalty for someone wearing a mask while committing a crime? That seems doable.
Since the pandemic, a lot of people in New York City now see masking as a reasonable thing to do in crowds, almost like people in Japan who wear masks when they have colds, to be considerate. There’s a nice man in the story who’s glad he masks regularly because he hasn’t had any respiratory illnesses in the last four years, and now thinks it was “wild” that he never wore a mask on the subway before COVID.
Those most freaked out by the potential mask ban aren’t thugs and hooligans (a difficult demographic to assess), but people with medical conditions that already have them stressed out:
Meredith Cann, a telehealth psychotherapist in Manhattan who largely serves immunocompromised and disabled people, said she has prospective clients seeking mental health care because they are terrified after hearing Hochul’s and Adams’s calls to limit masking.
“Average everyday people are going to hear what our governor and mayor are saying: People who wear masks are criminal,” said Cann, who receives weekly injections of an immunosuppressive drug for a chronic condition. “We are afraid for our quality of life and our ability to just exist in public.”
Here is where we would put that gif of Donald Sutherland pointing and caption it “CRIIIIIMES.”
PREVIOUSLY!
[WaPo (gift link)]
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Oh sure, they say it's to fight rude protesters and crime, but it's the same old culture war in different clothes, almost like a ... facial disguise of some sort.
"Bad actors have been using masks..."
You could say the same about guns. *shrug emoji*