Articles

Throughout the last year, I’ve read a lot of masking arguments but none that broached my top objection: mask mandates force me to communicate what I believe are very dangerous lies.

Even if masks ultimately do provide some small reduction in coronavirus spread without imposing additional harms, a contentious claim, to me that is almost beside the point. The point is the security theater, which assumes that drastic government micromanagement of our lives and indefinite curtailment of our liberties are not only ever acceptable but in fact the moral thing to do.

I’m not talking about high-risk situations like nursing homes or hospitals or the homes of cancer patients, where I am willing to mask and sanitize and so forth for the chance it may indeed protect highly vulnerable people. I’m talking about in normal life, in public settings. Despite what people have been shanghaied into assuming, these are low-risk environments and should be treated as such.

Far above and beyond any health considerations, masking is a symbol. It is a talisman, a ritual, a communication of premises that I utterly reject. Being forced to wear a mask to me is the equivalent of being forced to wear a T-shirt that supports legalized abortion, which I believe is mass murder.