Pretty crazy. “Republican officials are now mainstreaming the anti-vaxx extremists,” Digby observed on Monday, reflecting on the movment’s hysterical comparisons of vaccines and mask mandates to the Holocaust.
At Medium, Wajahat Ali writes that you may be “done” with Covid, but Covid doesn’t give a shit. To his slam of “grown-ass men and women who lament about wearing masks in public, showing vaccination cards, or forfeiting indoor brunches with their friends,” he adds:
No, these adults aren’t being childish. They are simply acting like assholes. My kids are ages 7, 5, and 2. Yes, even the two-year-old wore a mask without complaint. They are not unique.
Last weekend began with the March for Life and ended at the Lincoln Memorial with a march for death, Dana Milbank observes. Pro-life marchers on Friday chanted, “A child, not a choice.” Anti-vaxx marchers on Sunday proclaimed, “My body, my choice.”
Milbank writes this morning:
The crowds weren’t the same, but collectively, the two rallies captured the hypocrisy of the right at this moment: Protect the unborn, but feel free to infect — and perhaps kill — innocent people already born, including, er, pregnant women. And yet both movements claim to be operating under the authority of “God’s mandate” and “God’s law,” as the anti-vaccine speakers repeatedly put it. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.
In a rare moment of self-awareness at the anti-vaccine rally, JP Sears, the event’s emcee, quipped that because of his belief in natural immunity to the coronavirus, “I kind of feel like a flat-Earther.”
On a related topic, I wrote recently that “Galileo’s private observations, once published, threatened long-held assumptions about how the world worked … More was at stake than astronomy.” His observations questioned the centrality of humans in God’s creation that people had always comfortably assumed. People did not much like having their importance questioned, especially people inside the Vatican. It took Vatican officials 359 years to admit Galileo got it right and they got it wrong.
It’s barely been a century and a half since the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments settled on paper, at least, that White Christians are not the center of economic, religious, and cultural life in America. The backlash over that is not yet done. The more the reality sinks in that Whites are not the apex citizens, the crazier it makes some of them.
The Deathers promised on Sunday to “prosecute — and execute — scientists, political opponents and journalists” they despise for efforts to save human life, Milbank writes. “Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.”
God help us that they are not the death of this country. Because many would see government of the people, by the people, for the people perish from the earth rather than resign themselves to not ruling the rest of us.
Part 2 here.