Southern GOP Officials Put People In Danger By Playing Politics

The virus is once again raging across the country. We could have had it under control by now, but too many Republican politicians (especially in the South) have chosen to play politics over mask mandates and vaccinations. They seem to consider public health officials and medical workers to be the enemies, rather than the virus.

The following is part of an op-ed by Margaret Renki in The New York Times: 

In case you’re wondering how things are going here in the Delta Rising region of the United States, I regret to report that things are going badly. Very, very badly.

Our intensive care units are full. Our children are getting sick in record numbers. Nevertheless, a small subset of unmasked, unvaccinated humanity has taken to yelling during school board meetings, and the most extreme protesters have issued threats against nurses and physicians who dared to speak publicly on behalf of such reasonable pandemic mitigation measures as masks and vaccines.

It’s so bad that the Tennessee Medical Association had to issue a statement in support of the exhausted heroes who for the past 18 months have been risking their own lives to care for strangers. “The enemy is the virus, not health care workers,” the statement read.

This is what some of us have become here in the American South: people who need to be reminded that our doctors are not our enemies.

Things have gotten this terrible for one reason: Our elected leaders keep making an already bad situation much worse. Consider Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee. When a handful of school districts here began to issue mask mandates to protect children too young to be vaccinated — as advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — he issued an executive order allowing disgruntled parents to opt out, effectively rendering all mask mandates unenforceable. . . .

Children, like adults, wear masks in part for their own protection and in part to protect others. Mask mandates protect children only when masking is universal. This is not a hard concept to understand.

We cannot blame ignorance for Mr. Lee’s executive order. It is nothing short of perfidy to place a higher priority on humoring the kind of people who threaten doctors and nurses than on protecting the health and safety of schoolchildren and their families. . . .

It’s worth pointing out that this is a partisan position, not a regional one. In the three Southern states headed up by Democratic governors — Kentucky, Louisiana and Virginia — school mask mandates are firmly in place. But as a Republican, Mr. Lee is not remotely alone. In fact, in banning school mask mandates he was essentially copying Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who issued a similar executive order more than two weeks before Mr. Lee. The ban issued by Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott, came a day before Mr. DeSantis’s.

Fortunately, many citizens in these states and others in the region are determined to keep themselves and their children safe, even if their leaders keep undermining those efforts at every turn. . . .

That message of civil disobedience seems to be resonating across the South.

Last week, the school board of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Florida’s largest school district, and school districts in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa and Palm Beach County, voted to approve mask mandates in open defiance of Mr. DeSantis’s ban. And they did so despite the threat of penalties leveled by the Florida state board of education against board members and superintendents in Broward and Alachua Counties, which had already established mask mandates.

In South Carolina, which passed a ban on mask mandates as part of its budget, a bipartisan group of state legislators has called for a special session to reconsider the ban. The city of Columbia has passed a mask mandate in elementary and middle schools, and fire marshals are in place to enforce it.

School districts across Texas — in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio — are equally defiant. Arkansas’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, now regrets the ban he signed into law in the spring, and he is defying his base in attempting to overturn or modify the ban.

Look at a map of the worst Covid hot spots around the country, and you will see that the region getting most pummeled by this virus is, not coincidentally, the same one that is governed primarily by Republicans. Those supermajorities are why there has always been plenty of perfidy to go around down here, but this time the Republicans in charge have gone too far. People have finally stopped waiting for their leaders to lead and are taking matters into their own hands.

Our lives and our children’s lives are on the line.