What would happen if a “private” education or health care facility denied service to someone who not only didn’t take precautions against ...
What would happen if a “private” education or health care facility denied service to someone who not only didn’t take precautions against contracting HIV, but was actually HIV-positive? Could a medical center deny a procedure to such an individual? Could a day care center deny entry to such a kid? Not a chance, because like it or not, we have systemic anti-discrimination laws in place. So why is it that people can be drummed out of public accommodations on account of not getting vaccines that the government directly promotes, endorses, funds, and absolves of liability while working with Big Tech to censor all info about it? In other words, if your red-state Republicans are touting some “private business can do what it wants” argument, they are full of BS.
Imagine being Ashley Tipton, a single mother fleeing communist California in search of freedom in Idaho. You enroll your 20-month-old baby in a day care center in Meridian, Idaho, only to be expelled for not having the child get all of the shots, even though the other children have this supposed protection and should not need to violate someone else’s bodily autonomy to be protected. What’s worse is that the lawyer for the Minnesota-based New Horizon Academy sent a letter to Brian Festa, Tipton’s attorney, citing Idaho’s own Republican governor’s support for corporate rights over individual rights as rationale for the policy denying Tipton’s request for a religious exemption. Festa, of We the Patriots USA, is representing Tipton and read a portion of the lawyer’s letter on my podcast last week:
“We note that Idaho is undeniably committed to the private right of businesses to manage their enterprises as they see fit,” read the letter received by Festa. “To that end, earlier this year when the legislature tried to pass the failed Coronavirus Pause Act, which sought to prevent employers from requiring COVID-19 vaccination as a condition to employment, the bill was vetoed by Idaho Gov. Brad Little, citing the bill as an example of governmental overreach into the purview of private business.”
Indeed, Brad Little worked assiduously to block any anti-discrimination measures or even limitations on his emergency powers. This is the attitude of nearly every GOP governor besides Ron DeSantis. They believe that at the same time states have numerous occupational licensing laws, disability laws, occupational safety laws, and yes, anti-discrimination laws, somehow they are powerless to prevent the worst form of discrimination when it comes at the behest of the federal government working with global governments and the entire corporate world to poison people’s bodies on behalf of the most greedy and corrupt industry of all time.
Without that public-private collaboration, the entire vaccination regime would never have gotten off the ground. Without government carving out full liability indemnity for vaccines – a mega courtesy not accorded to any other manufacturer – no business would ever mandate it. Civil rights cannot be a one-way street, especially when they cut against an individual’s own bodily autonomy and religious objections to immunotherapy going into their bodies.
Indeed, the time has come for red states to add health status to civil rights anti-discrimination laws. There is no legal, moral, or scientific rationale to ever require a person to apply a pharmaceutical product on or in a person’s body. If the slate on anti-discrimination law in the private sector were clean, we’d be having a different discussion, but given that it already applies in every other context, you better believe we will apply it where it is needed most.
Take HIV, for example. Contracting HIV is certainly much more the fault of the infected person in 99% of cases than it is with coronavirus, which has proven unavoidable unless you stay under a rock forever. Yet a federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled in 1990 that the zoning department, under pressure from concerned citizens, could not block a permit for construction of a hospice for AIDS patients simply because people had public health concerns.
José Antonio Fusté, former chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, ruled at the time that although there is “great cause for concern” about the AIDS epidemic, “when legitimate concern is fanned by a profound misunderstanding of the causes of AIDS, the rush to panic can easily result in illegal and unjustifiable discrimination against not only the disease's victims but also against the laudable efforts of individuals working to contain the flames.” He concluded that the Puerto Rican authority, “by misguidedly succumbing to community pressure, has itself become a party to such discrimination.”
Even though in the Puerto Rico case, the people themselves irrevocably and permanently were infected with the disease, the 1990 order called the actions taken by the people in the community “irrational” and “unfounded.” “Generalized perceptions about disabilities and unfounded speculations about threats to safety are specifically rejected as grounds to justify exclusion,” wrote Judge Fusté in the 1990 opinion.
It's time we stop blocking people who opt against pharma’s latest toys from vital access to health care and education, especially given that those products are buttressed by federal intervention to the Nth degree. There is no conservative or libertarian argument for keeping these carve-outs in liability and discrimination for just one sector or issue – especially the two together.
Gone are the days when corporations were the bulwark against government tyranny. Far from the nostalgic days of Reagan, the corporations that exist today owe their very dominance to tendentious favors from government and have thus become its greatest collaborators. Nobody explained this agenda clearer than Klaus Schwab at the recent G20 confab in Bali. “Governments and business have to cooperate in order to become a fast fish, because in our world of today, it’s not any more so much the big fish eats the small fish, but it’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish. And in order to be a fast fish, and a big fish, hopefully, like Indonesia, you have to have two copilots: business and government.”
You and I are that “slow fish” in Schwab’s Darwinian design of the Fourth Reich he refers to as the “fourth industrial revolution.” If we don’t have red states interposing against this tyranny swiftly and resolutely, we will be dead fish.
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