(Dobbs) No Masks? No Local Control? Oh The Hypocrisy.
Most Americans, by the way, support masks in schools.
At the core of the conservative credo, for almost as long as I can remember, is local control. Don’t tread on me!
The argument goes like this: here at the grass roots, we know what’s good for us. With abortion rights, with gun reform, with legalized marijuana, with minimum wage, with gay marriage, and in its latest incarnation, with voting rights. They all but tell us on voting rights, “Hey, if we want to make it harder to vote (translation: harder for Democrat-leaning minorities to vote), that’s up to us and big government had better keep its nose out of our business.”
So local control— some call it individualism, some call it self-government— is a bedrock of conservative thinking.
Except when it’s not.
Like in Florida. Ten school districts in the state, including the biggest ones, issued mask mandates to protect against Covid. That is local control. But for the governor, it’s apparently a little too local. So to suppress them, he issued threats. If districts didn’t back down, the state would withhold a portion of their funding. That, if you hadn’t noticed, is government control.
The districts defied him anyway. A look at Florida’s battle with Covid will show you why. With its death rate breaking new records— almost 1,600 Floridians are dying every week, the worst since the pandemic started— one out of every five fatalities nationwide is now in Florida. In many of its major hospitals, the morgues are full to overflowing. Several dozen report that they are even short of oxygen.
And the picture’s no brighter for Florida’s children. They are getting infected at record rates— kids between five and fourteen now constitute up to 20% of new cases of the coronavirus. It prompted the chairwoman of the Broward County school board— where three teachers just died of Covid in the week before school started— to defend her district’s mask mandate and say in defiance of the governor, she wasn’t willing to "risk and play Russian roulette.”
But Governor DeSantis is. “The fact of the matter,” he says, “is that parents are in the best position to know what’s best for their kids”… well, except for that alarming 20% of cases where evidently they don’t. But that’s the governor’s idea of local control. He has faith in his fellow Floridians, he says, to exercise “personal responsibility”… well, except for those irresponsible enough to repudiate masks and vaccinations and make Florida one of the worst states in the nation. But that’s his idea of local control. I want to ask the governor, how’s that personal responsibility thing working for you right now?
It took a court of law on Friday to cite the durable Supreme Court ruling that it’s illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater and rule against DeSantis, underscoring the principle that we don’t have the right to endanger others. In other words, if school districts believe mask mandates are critical to protect students and staff from the dangers of Covid, they should have the discretion to impose them and no one— not parents, not governors— should have the discretion to inhibit them. That’s the real value of local control.
Same question about personal responsibility to Governor Abbott in Texas, where they have the highest number of Covid cases since the crisis started. Hospitals are so overwhelmed, hundreds with Covid can’t even get a bed. Yet the governor’s press secretary said this week in an email about the schools, “The time for mask mandates is over. Parents and guardians have the right to decide whether their child will wear a mask or not, just as with any other decision in their child’s life.” There’s that mantra of local control again… coming down from the capital. What do local school districts want? Apparently it doesn’t matter. What about other children put at risk when classmates aren’t masked? Same answer.
What the governor misses— what a bunch of governors are missing— is that when parents decide they won’t make their child wear a mask, it’s not just that child who suffers higher risk. It’s every child in the classroom. They might think they’re in the best position to know what’s good for their kids, but they aren’t in the best position to know what’s good for everyone else’s.
Abbott even said of mandates in general, “People and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate.” But isn’t that precisely what he’s doing with his own state’s schools? When a number of districts mandated masks, including Houston, Dallas, Austin, and El Paso, he issued an order saying they can’t. Got to hand it to the Independent School District in Paris, Texas, which found a loophole in the governor’s order and incorporated protective masks into the schools’ dress codes. When children’s lives are threatened and a governor doesn’t seem to care, you do what you gotta do. That’s local control.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy is also rich in South Dakota, where Governor Kristi Noem has fought mandates every step of the way and brags, “We trusted our people, and it told them that personal responsibility was the best answer.” The Covid case surge a couple of weeks ago in Noem’s state was the highest in the U.S.
It’s just as rich in Georgia, where the National Guard has had to deploy to hospitals where staffs can’t keep up any more with the load. Yet Governor Brian Kemp signed an order and declared, “Local governments will not be allowed to force businesses to be the city’s mask police, the vaccine police, or any other burdensome restriction.” As if the coronavirus isn’t burdening the system all by itself.
The callousness of these governors is criminal. If they have their way, no restaurant can require masks even if you want to safely get a meal. No passenger ship can require vaccinations even if you want to safely take a cruise. Mandates, they argue, infringe on our freedoms. Yet their version of local control is, businesses shouldn’t have the freedom to make their own decisions about what’s best— for their customers, for their staffs, for themselves— because politicians in the capital know better. Neither, evidently, should schools.
Personally, I go with former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who earlier this month said to Americans who put their freedom to be irresponsible above everyone else’s to be safe, “Screw your freedom… with freedom comes obligations and responsibilities.”
Of course each of us is free to blame whoever we like for the surge of the Covid virus. Governor DeSantis went on Fox the other day and blamed Joe Biden. “He said he was going to end Covid. He hasn’t done that.”
Gee, Governor, I wonder if it’s because pious politicians like you, preaching local control but fighting it when it’s not convenient, keep standing in the way?
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Greg, I’d add to your critique of the anti-mandate Republicans the following question: Don’t they realize that a mandate against a mandate IS a mandate?
That exposes the shallowness of their claimed ideology.
Bob Louthan
Thank you for telling it like it is.