Protesters wanting to "Reopen" America risk lives

This post was published in the Wilson Times April 24, 2020

Barely a month into North Carolina’s “Stay at Home” order, protests are popping up across the country, including one in Raleigh that let to an arrest of one protester.

Protests in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Utah opposed restrictive executive orders that required residents to stay home and ordered businesses and schools to close. All these restrictions are aimed at containing the COVID-19 pandemic that has infected nearly 7,000 people in North Carolina and killed more than 40,000 in the United States, which now has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths of any nation.

Protesters are making two arguments against the anti-pandemic orders that have been effective, scientists and medical experts agree.

The first argument is that the executive orders have ruined the nation’s economy. Many small businesses have shut down because of lack of customers (who are staying at home as ordered) or inability to obtain merchandise or needed equipment because of travel restrictions.

The second argument is that governors’ executive orders violate citizens’ constitutional rights.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceably assemble, and the Fourth Amendment protects a right to privacy. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments allow limits on life, liberty and property only after due process of law. But the Constitution allows state governors to issue orders to protect the health and safety of the population. As I have written before, no constitutional rights are absolute. Your right to practice your religion will not allow you to engage in human sacrifice.

These confinements are supported by constitutional scholars and by epidemiologists. Although the restrictions may be extremely inconvenient and disappointing (as travel plans, family reunions, graduations and other events are ruined), stay home rules, “social distancing” and other measures are the best defense the states and whole nation have to prevent illness and death, experts at the Centers for Disease Control say. Polls show that about two-thirds of the public support measures to contain the virus, despite their harm to the economy.

The Washington Post and other news sources have identified a number of right-wing Republican groups and conspiracy theorists who are supporting or igniting the protests. Even President Trump, who had endorsed the very measures the governors imposed, reversed course and tweeted “Liberate Michigan,” “Liberate Virginia” and “Liberate Minnesota.” “Liberate”? Is he advocating violent overthrow of duly elected governors?

The virulent protests are dividing the populace into two camps: those who are willing to risk the lives of others for their own convenience and those who think their personal inconveniences and economic sacrifices are worth it to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others.

At a time when national unity and global cooperation are needed, the protesters and their cheerleaders are endangering everyone — your family, your neighbors, the elderly, the vulnerable. This pandemic has shown its deadly ways can afflict anyone.