No Mandates! Mandates! And the Republican Religious Right

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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)

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"No Mandates! No Mandates!! No Mandates!!!" This seems to be the common approach to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic adopted by the vast bulk of the Republican Party. Elected and otherwise. "It's my body; they're my children," and etc. "And I get to decide." Whether we are dealing with company- or government- (the Armed Services) mandated COVID-19 vaccination for their employees, or mandatory mask-wearing in schools, and everything in-between, that is the common response emanating from the Right. (By the way, I have not seen any calls from any responsible sources calling for mandatory vaccination of the population in general, the far extremes of the anti-vaxx movement, Right and Left, scream about that possibility on a regular basis.)

(Actually, such anti-health messages do indeed emanate from certain sectors of the Left --- I'm on a couple of list-serves which promote this message. But I don't think that the message from that side of the political spectrum reaches too many people, fortunately. In any case, I am not sure that some of the so-called "leftists" putting forth such positions as that the whole thing is the result of a plot by Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros, and etc. to, pick one: reduce the Earth's population, bring all under fascist control, vastly increase the profits of the drug companies, and etc., are not actually trolls, whether they present as individuals or as "medical journals." [I am not going to dignify Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outrageous attack on Dr. Fauci with any kind of response, for it is so outrageous that it needs none.] But I am not nearly technologically equipped enough to do down that possible find-the-trolls rabbit-hole, so I won't. And in any case, since most left-wingers who I know are rational, I think that the main outcome of the anti-vaxx propaganda that appears on the left-wing sites with which I am familiar, and others as well, I am sure, is to drive people who wish to express and discuss traditional left-wing policies, off the sites. Which, trolls or just anti-science, they have been doing.)

But now getting back to the "No-mandates" mantra for the Right (and fortunately it has not infected all Republicans) for this particular epidemic. First, as many of the readers of these columns know, I am a career public health physician. A couple of weeks ago my son asked me if I knew of any other major pandemic in history that had been politicized the way this one has been. I replied that while I certainly had not studied the history of pandemics in any detail, I certainly did not know of any major one in which political forces had intervened to promote interventions or lack thereof that would actually end up promoting the spread of the disease. Which the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, let's-wait-until-people-get-sick-and-then-treat-them-crowd do. Although COVID-19 is a particularly challenging type of viral respiratory (an important word --- it's spread through the air) disease, the public health basics for dealing with it are very straightforward: "social distancing," masking, testing-contact-tracing-isolation, and, when available, vaccination.

But what we have here --- and it started with Trump --- is on the Right the politicization for electoral purposes of the responses or non-responses to it. E.g., see the first ten paragraphs or so of my recent column on this same subject, "Why Anti-Pandemic Control: from the Right" for a summary of my extensive writings over time on that subject. Which is precisely what Republicans from Abbott to DeSantis [Florida recently suffered its highest increase in number of COVID-19 deaths yet] and everyone in between are doing. And, for example, in a fund-raising letter of August 9, 2021, DeSantis made it very clear that he is speaking to a national, not just Floridian, audience, when he said: "The Left is currently doing everything they can to take [your] God-given rights away from you." And do note there that DeSantis is talking about "God-given" rights, not those talking that are protected by, say, the Constitution, for all Americans, believers or not.

Of course, their policies are killing people in their states, from getting excess numbers of cases to deaths to overwhelming hospital systems (which effects not only those infected with COVID-19 but also other persons who might need, say, an important surgery, from getting the proper care because all the beds are full). And so, turning to Texas, while Health authorities and university researchers have said masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Gov. (and GOP Presidential nominee-wanna-be) Abbott has argued that his executive order prohibiting mandates allows Texans to rely on "personal responsibility rather than government mandates." Now this is an absolutely fascinating statement in the context of "when Abbott does believe in one particular mandate," firmly implanted in the law, too, a subject to which we shall return shortly.

Why do Abbott, DeSantis, and many other Republican politicians with their eyes on the 2022 and 2024 elections, take such a strong anti-mandate position, for actions that can control the spread of COVID-19? Well, as noted, as noted by me and many other observers, as Republican politicians they've got their eyes on all those Republican primary voters and then on to all those Minority-majority Republican voters in all of the gerrymandered-voter-suppressed states they are setting up for hopefully (for them) easy wins in 2022 and 2024. And so on and so forth.

So many of us go after Abbott and DeSantis as the killers they are. But then one can also look at the contradictions within their "no-mandates-in-dealing-with-a-particular-preventable-disease" position. Although they have not made themselves clear on this one, as school comes back into session in their states, they do not seem to have taken a position against the mandating of the standard set of required vaccinations for school children over time (wait for it) --- diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis/polio/measles/mumps/rubella/hepatitis B/varicella/meningococcus/hepatitis. Hm. That is odd, is it not? Anti-one-kind-of-infectious-disease-protectve-mandate-but-not-a-whole-bunch-of-others (even though no one is calling for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for school attendance, just mask-wearing). And then what about mandates on such public health matters as the prohibition against defecation into a public water supply. Presumably Abbott would support that mandate (but, I do have to say "Hey, you never know").

Well even odder in this context is what kind of government-mandates-concerning-health-and-personal issues they, and every other Republican Governor whose position I am familiar with, are for. And what would that be? Why the mandate that every pregnant woman carry every pregnancy to term, whether they want to or not. And Abbott is hell bent for leather on this mandate. NO abortions after 6 weeks (at which time most pregnant women don't know that they are pregnant). Absolutely not. None. How does Abbott justify his position? Well, pregnancies are "gifts from God", donchaknow. As he has said: "Life is a gift from God, and we must do everything we can to defend Texans' most basic rights endowed by our Creator and guaranteed in the Constitution." Can't interfere with that, donchaknow. And how does Abbott know that? Well, he just does, and that's that.

Which brings right into the classical position of the Republican Religious Right: that their religious beliefs can determine, with the force of law, the constraints and restraints in terms of pregnancy and its outcome on any woman, whether or not that woman a) believes in "God" or not, and b) even if she does, may well believe that "God" does not prohibit abortion when the woman decides that it is in her best interest (that is, in my view, up to the time of viability). As regular readers of mine know, I have written regularly on this issue, how the Republican Religious Right wants to establish a political system based on religious authoritarianism and impose it on the entire population, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

And so, it can be seen that there is an open attack line on these Republican governors in particular, and the Republican Religious Right voters in general, of which one would guess many are also "no-maskers/anti-vaxxers." (I have no idea how many of the of the latter are also anti-abortion-rights, but a good guess is: many.) Their side is for no mandates when it comes to protecting the health of the public in general (and even themselves in particular), especially in the context of the fact that there are so many public health-focused mandates with which virtually everyone already complies.

OK. If they are for no mandates when it comes to the health of the public, they should also be for no mandates when it comes to personal choice in the outcome of pregnancy. And as for the argument that "OK, if you are going to be for no mandates when it comes to the outcome of pregnancy then you are being totally contradictory when it comes to supporting mandates to promote the health of the public." Well, no again. First, for mandates to protect the health of the public they are a) already in widespread use and b) supported by science. Second, mandates for, say, mask-wearing, are conditional: you don't have to wear a mask everywhere and anywhere, only when you want to, or have your child be eligible to, engage in activities that put others at risk. These are public health/health-of-the-public considerations.

On the other hand, every proposed mandate for carrying pregnancy to term regardless of the wishes of the pregnant woman is based on some concept of "God" and related religious doctrine, such as the notion that "life begins at the moment of conception." Yes indeed, the mandate that every pregnancy should be carried to term regardless of the beliefs of the pregnant woman is based entirely on a religious belief, the imposition of which on the general population just happens to be prohibited by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. So, some blanket mandates are OK with the Republican Religious Right, indeed are found at the center of their doctrines. But others, which simply apply to certain choices one can or cannot make, are not OK. It seems to me like this might provide a good opening for an expansion of the bases for the campaign to maintain the decision on the maintenance or not of a pregnancy to be entirely with the control of the pregnant woman.

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Addendum. As for what is happening with the Republican Religious Right and the Taliban, even as they rip into Biden for how he is dealing with the total mess that Trump left on his plate, Michelle Goldberg (NYT, 8/28/21, p. A19, .nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/alt-right-taliban.html) had this note about how the RRR is cozying up to the Afghani version: "The [Right-wing twitter] account, now suspended, was just one example of the open admiration for the Taliban that's developed within parts of the American right. The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes - an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin - wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: 'The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.' An account linked to the Proud Boys expressed respect for the way the Taliban 'took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.'" Religious Right, meet Religious Right.

(Article changed on Aug 28, 2021 at 4:19 PM EDT)