Outrage over vaccine mandates is now a mainstream GOP stance. But in 1949, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson asserted that “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
In a world where the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 deaths are among the unvaccinated and the spread of variants like omicron can threaten to overwhelm hospital systems, the time for emphasizing choice has long since passed. It is to the detriment of our society that disease be allowed to spread unchecked. You would think that this, too, would be a conservative belief.
However, it’s hard to pinpoint when the Republican Party’s hostility to scientific fact went, shall we say, viral. For 40 years, from the early days of acid rain to our ongoing debates about climate change, Republican spokespeople have been saying scientists are “always getting it wrong.” But 2021 was the year that science denial became lethal.
Wearing a face mask and doing social distancing is not much to ask. Nor is it a tall order for employers to maintain COVID protections.
But when citizens refuse to adhere to the recommended protections or get vaccinated, based on constitutional rights, they simply enter into Justice Jackson’s “suicide pact.”
