No Mandates! Mandates! And the Republican Religious Right

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

Greg Abbott tea party stickers. Don't tread on me when it comes to, say, masks, but I surely can tread on you when it comes to, say, choice in the outcome of pregnancy.
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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, while I have not seen any calls for mandatory vaccination of the population in general, the far extremes of the anti-vaxx movement, both Right and Left, scream about that possibility on a regular basis.)

As many of the readers of these columns know, it happens that I come to this subject from a career as a 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 disease, the public health basics for dealing with it are still 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.  (For example, 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 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 else in between are doing. And they intend to go beyond their own states. 

In a fund-raising letter of August 9, 2021, DeSantis made this very clear, when he said: "The Left is currently doing everything they can to take [your] God-given rights away from you." Further, on a different note, do note there that DeSantis is talking about "God-given" rights, not those that are protected by, say, the Constitution, for all Americans, believers or not.  Of course, their policies are killing people in their states, “believers” or not, from getting excess numbers of cases and deaths, to overwhelming hospital systems (which affects not only those infected with COVID-19 but also other persons who might need, say, an important surgery, but cannot get admitted because all of the beds are full).  

In re masking, turning to Texas as an example, 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.  In any case, these policies are adopted because 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.

Now of course their "no-mandates” position applies only to this particular preventable disease. 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, beyond the arena of preventable infectious disease.  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 one. 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 fetal 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).  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 against we public-health-mandates supporters 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) they are 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." That is, 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 mandates (such as forcing any pregnant woman to carry the pregnancy to term) are OK with the Republican Religious Right and indeed are found at the center of their doctrines. But others, such as those dealing with the health of the public, are not OK. It seems to me that 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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An earlier version of this article was published at: https://www.opednews.com/articles/No-Mandates-Mandates-And-by-Steven-Jonas-Governors_Mandates_Republican-Extremism_Republican-Hate-210827-591.html