Because covering your junk is based on judeo-christian morals which are reflected in our law in ways that certain “obscene” things have historically fallen outside of free expression rights... those are going away and you won’t successfully argue that not wearing a mask is obscene.
Yes, quarantine has been successfully defended on individuals, small groups, or specific areas. “Quarantine” on whole populations has not and would not be.
It has nothing to do with being anti-mask, your government just doesn’t have the power to force everyone to wear masks for half the year because somebody thinks it’sa good idea to prevent their kids from getting minor infections.
The direct effect of COVID-19 on kids is not the issue, but the fact that they can spread it to vulnerable adults, including their teachers, parents, and grandparents, and whoever they infect could infect even more.
This has and will continue to cause lots of older people to die, even if the kids themselves remain mostly unharmed.
As for the government's power, see what they did in WW2. They had major propaganda campaigns to get everyone on board (like "Loose Lips Sink Ships", Presidential "fireside chat" addresses, and propaganda posters everywhere, etc), a united and determined Congress, and actual leadership that helped the entire nation become aware and engaged with the war effort.
If there was this kind of leadership, media effort, and peer-pressure today as there was during WW2, along with laws and actual enforcement against non-compliant anti-maskers, then you can believe there'd be a hell of a lot less anti-maskers even trying to get out of wearing a mask, never mind staging mass anti-mask protests (with Presidential encouragement!).
The political bickering, selfishness, and incompetency in the US has already resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and will probably cause hundreds of thousands if not millions more.
While I'm not against mandatory wearing of masks while in public(when necessary), I feel they should have been distributed by emergency services, or placed on pallets in supermarkets, at gas stations, like it happened with telephone books and yellow pages in the past. Same goes for disinfectant. Why should I have to pay overblown prices for that stuff?
You've yet to explain why the government can have the power to compel women to wear clothing over their chest, no power to compel men to do so, and no power to compel either gender to wear a mask.
Your argument for it boils down to "That's just the way things are."
Point to the power granted to the government which allows it to force you to wear a mask, or the supreme court case which might be relevant.
The first amendment guarantees congress may make no law that limits freedom of expression. How you dress is interpreted as expression, and communicable disease has never been used to justify broad mandates about what you wear in public. Carveouts made for obscenity don't fit, you could never find a cultural context to defend not wearing a mask as obscene. Carveouts for public health risk i.e. quarantine don't fit because the people being affected have no chance to defend themselves in court when subjected, you cannot get judicial review for the entire country.
Mask mandates enforceable by law outside the regulation of commerce certainly require constitutional amendment, and that will never happen.
Covid is not worse than public health threats in the past. We have been living in relative safety when it comes to disease for several decades, and I believe that has just ended. You will have to find the political will for people to fundamentally and permanently alter the national and global norms of life in order to try to maintain the old status quo, and I just don't see it happening, and I don't see any court holding up mandates.
Constitutional protections of freedom of expression are not absolute.
The most well known such limit is that on yelling fire in a crowded theater, which is limited in the interest of public safety.
Going outdoors without a mask also impacts public safety, so the government could prohibit it if they wanted to.
The problem is that the country is not united on this, and political agendas are getting in the way of keeping people healthy and safe.
COVID-19 is definitely a worse health threat than any seen in most Americans' lifetimes. Despite all the shutdowns, social distancing, and mask use, there are already around 200k American deaths from COVID-19, and it hasn't even been a year yet. That's about 50% of American casualties during all of WW2.
People are just not taking this seriously enough, and that needs to drastically change if we want a chance of things returning to anything remotely approaching "normal" any time soon.
And what is the test for yelling “fire!” in a crowded place? Clear and present danger.
You can easily argue that one person yelling falsely in a theater could be believed to cause injury or death in an immediate sense.
You cannot make that argument for an undiagnosed person without symptoms or an entire population. Increased risk? Yes. The expectation that an individual action will have short order consequences? No.
"Clear and present danger" is a vague term -- just the kind the Supreme Court is infamous for interpreting whatever way they damn well please.
You could make a good argument that the hundreds of thousands of dead in the US alone of COVID-19 presents a "clear danger", and that the scientific evidence showing that not wearing a mask increases the odds of infection makes it a "present danger".
The danger need not cause deaths in the next minute or second to be "clear and present". Typhoid Mary was imprisoned for the rest of her life for recklessly endangering people with her asymptomatic typhoid infection. People did die because of her actions, but she was imprisoned not because of that but because of the danger she caused to society -- one that did not guarantee anyone would die, but just increase their odds of dying.
People coming from infected areas have also been regularly quarantined, even if there was no proof that any particular individual was infected. This was unarguably a limitation on the quarantined individuals' freedom, but it was deemed permissible to protect public health.
Requiring the wearing of masks is a much milder curtailment of freedom compared to quarantine, so the Supreme Court could certainly uphold such a public health measure were it to be implemented.
And yet, both government-mandated and private dress codes (Which governments have found to be perfectly binding), ranging from the length of your shirt's sleeves (At a government-ran school), to the requirement to wear shoes to receive service, to the requirement to wear a particular color of clothing to work (Work dress codes), or to receive service, to the requirement to wear protective gear to work, to the requirement to not wear particular items of clothing in certain contexts (face veils) are all completely enforceable, even when they have nothing to do with obscenity.
It's a entirely unprincipled double-standard when a high school can censure a girl for wearing a halter top with straps that are narrower then three finger widths, but apparently can't enforce a mask mandate.
Regulating commerce is an enumerated power. Regulating dress in public is not. Government can tell you how to dress at work or what you have to require your customers to wear, they can’t tell you how to dress in public. Court cases are frequently won in schools on freedom of expression laws.
The first enumerated power in Seciton 8 of the Constitution states:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States..."
The "general Welfare of the United States" could be interpreted to include taking such measure that are necessary for the protection of public health.
As for court cases which recognized freedom of expression in public schools, did any of them do so at the expense of the health of the students, teachers, or the community?
The supreme court is of the opinion that general welfare "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments."
And i have to say that’s a good opinion, if it was any other way you could basically make it mean anything. Wanting the constitution to mean that your position on one topic has to have broader considerations... if X is allowed with this argument what else would be?
"The supreme court is of the opinion that general welfare "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments.""
Well, that's ironic, as it goes against a plain reading of the Constitution.
Strict constructionists must be rolling in their graves.
We make people cover certain small parts of their bodies which were historically found “obscene” to expose which circumvents the free expression right and those requirements don’t exist in many places and are generally eroding. You can’t make the same argument about masks.
Even now nowhere is it actually required to wear a mask in public. Go read an order, they’re all written in ways that say “you must” but carve out exceptions which make them impossible to enforce if they were backed by enforcement at all. This isn’t true inside commercial establishments but only in public.
If tested in court they would all fall flat that dont rely specifically on the government power to regulate commerce.
Not to be crass but young men leading the charge on the free the nipple campaigns seems counter productive... I’ll leave that filed under causes I support but will leave the fighting to those with skin in the game.
Comments
We literally make people wear clothes. Especially women.
Seriously how can someone think that mask requirements cannot be legal given this precedent haha
Because covering your junk is based on judeo-christian morals which are reflected in our law in ways that certain “obscene” things have historically fallen outside of free expression rights... those are going away and you won’t successfully argue that not wearing a mask is obscene.
No one actually causes the death of someone else by not covering up an "obscene" part of their body.
And, as in the case of Typhoid Mary, people have been deprived of their liberty for being a threat to public health.
So I wouldn't be too sure about the courts siding with the anti-maskers.
Yes, quarantine has been successfully defended on individuals, small groups, or specific areas. “Quarantine” on whole populations has not and would not be.
It has nothing to do with being anti-mask, your government just doesn’t have the power to force everyone to wear masks for half the year because somebody thinks it’sa good idea to prevent their kids from getting minor infections.
The direct effect of COVID-19 on kids is not the issue, but the fact that they can spread it to vulnerable adults, including their teachers, parents, and grandparents, and whoever they infect could infect even more.
This has and will continue to cause lots of older people to die, even if the kids themselves remain mostly unharmed.
As for the government's power, see what they did in WW2. They had major propaganda campaigns to get everyone on board (like "Loose Lips Sink Ships", Presidential "fireside chat" addresses, and propaganda posters everywhere, etc), a united and determined Congress, and actual leadership that helped the entire nation become aware and engaged with the war effort.
If there was this kind of leadership, media effort, and peer-pressure today as there was during WW2, along with laws and actual enforcement against non-compliant anti-maskers, then you can believe there'd be a hell of a lot less anti-maskers even trying to get out of wearing a mask, never mind staging mass anti-mask protests (with Presidential encouragement!).
The political bickering, selfishness, and incompetency in the US has already resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and will probably cause hundreds of thousands if not millions more.
While I'm not against mandatory wearing of masks while in public(when necessary), I feel they should have been distributed by emergency services, or placed on pallets in supermarkets, at gas stations, like it happened with telephone books and yellow pages in the past. Same goes for disinfectant. Why should I have to pay overblown prices for that stuff?
Wearing a mask is not being quarantined.
You've yet to explain why the government can have the power to compel women to wear clothing over their chest, no power to compel men to do so, and no power to compel either gender to wear a mask.
Your argument for it boils down to "That's just the way things are."
Things change.
Point to the power granted to the government which allows it to force you to wear a mask, or the supreme court case which might be relevant.
The first amendment guarantees congress may make no law that limits freedom of expression. How you dress is interpreted as expression, and communicable disease has never been used to justify broad mandates about what you wear in public. Carveouts made for obscenity don't fit, you could never find a cultural context to defend not wearing a mask as obscene. Carveouts for public health risk i.e. quarantine don't fit because the people being affected have no chance to defend themselves in court when subjected, you cannot get judicial review for the entire country.
Mask mandates enforceable by law outside the regulation of commerce certainly require constitutional amendment, and that will never happen.
Covid is not worse than public health threats in the past. We have been living in relative safety when it comes to disease for several decades, and I believe that has just ended. You will have to find the political will for people to fundamentally and permanently alter the national and global norms of life in order to try to maintain the old status quo, and I just don't see it happening, and I don't see any court holding up mandates.
Constitutional protections of freedom of expression are not absolute.
The most well known such limit is that on yelling fire in a crowded theater, which is limited in the interest of public safety.
Going outdoors without a mask also impacts public safety, so the government could prohibit it if they wanted to.
The problem is that the country is not united on this, and political agendas are getting in the way of keeping people healthy and safe.
COVID-19 is definitely a worse health threat than any seen in most Americans' lifetimes. Despite all the shutdowns, social distancing, and mask use, there are already around 200k American deaths from COVID-19, and it hasn't even been a year yet. That's about 50% of American casualties during all of WW2.
People are just not taking this seriously enough, and that needs to drastically change if we want a chance of things returning to anything remotely approaching "normal" any time soon.
And what is the test for yelling “fire!” in a crowded place? Clear and present danger.
You can easily argue that one person yelling falsely in a theater could be believed to cause injury or death in an immediate sense.
You cannot make that argument for an undiagnosed person without symptoms or an entire population. Increased risk? Yes. The expectation that an individual action will have short order consequences? No.
"Clear and present danger" is a vague term -- just the kind the Supreme Court is infamous for interpreting whatever way they damn well please.
You could make a good argument that the hundreds of thousands of dead in the US alone of COVID-19 presents a "clear danger", and that the scientific evidence showing that not wearing a mask increases the odds of infection makes it a "present danger".
The danger need not cause deaths in the next minute or second to be "clear and present". Typhoid Mary was imprisoned for the rest of her life for recklessly endangering people with her asymptomatic typhoid infection. People did die because of her actions, but she was imprisoned not because of that but because of the danger she caused to society -- one that did not guarantee anyone would die, but just increase their odds of dying.
People coming from infected areas have also been regularly quarantined, even if there was no proof that any particular individual was infected. This was unarguably a limitation on the quarantined individuals' freedom, but it was deemed permissible to protect public health.
Requiring the wearing of masks is a much milder curtailment of freedom compared to quarantine, so the Supreme Court could certainly uphold such a public health measure were it to be implemented.
And yet, both government-mandated and private dress codes (Which governments have found to be perfectly binding), ranging from the length of your shirt's sleeves (At a government-ran school), to the requirement to wear shoes to receive service, to the requirement to wear a particular color of clothing to work (Work dress codes), or to receive service, to the requirement to wear protective gear to work, to the requirement to not wear particular items of clothing in certain contexts (face veils) are all completely enforceable, even when they have nothing to do with obscenity.
It's a entirely unprincipled double-standard when a high school can censure a girl for wearing a halter top with straps that are narrower then three finger widths, but apparently can't enforce a mask mandate.
Regulating commerce is an enumerated power. Regulating dress in public is not. Government can tell you how to dress at work or what you have to require your customers to wear, they can’t tell you how to dress in public. Court cases are frequently won in schools on freedom of expression laws.
The first enumerated power in Seciton 8 of the Constitution states:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States..."
The "general Welfare of the United States" could be interpreted to include taking such measure that are necessary for the protection of public health.
As for court cases which recognized freedom of expression in public schools, did any of them do so at the expense of the health of the students, teachers, or the community?
The supreme court is of the opinion that general welfare "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments."
And i have to say that’s a good opinion, if it was any other way you could basically make it mean anything. Wanting the constitution to mean that your position on one topic has to have broader considerations... if X is allowed with this argument what else would be?
"The supreme court is of the opinion that general welfare "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments.""
Well, that's ironic, as it goes against a plain reading of the Constitution.
Strict constructionists must be rolling in their graves.
We make people cover certain small parts of their bodies which were historically found “obscene” to expose which circumvents the free expression right and those requirements don’t exist in many places and are generally eroding. You can’t make the same argument about masks.
Even now nowhere is it actually required to wear a mask in public. Go read an order, they’re all written in ways that say “you must” but carve out exceptions which make them impossible to enforce if they were backed by enforcement at all. This isn’t true inside commercial establishments but only in public.
If tested in court they would all fall flat that dont rely specifically on the government power to regulate commerce.
I suppose my heckling comes down to being skeptical that you are as adamant about shouting down nipple restrictions.
Not to be crass but young men leading the charge on the free the nipple campaigns seems counter productive... I’ll leave that filed under causes I support but will leave the fighting to those with skin in the game.