Deseret News
Claims are made in Utah and elsewhere that government doesn’t have the right to curb citizen activity in an epidemic. One Utahn recently stated, “I can’t abide the idea of the government deciding what is good for me and my family.” Another added, “We should have the agency to choose how healthy we want to be.”
To both I answer, making decisions about public safety and health is the very purpose of government in the first place. And while there is plenty of individual freedom to be healthy or sickly, there is less freedom for people to decide how sick their neighbors are going to be.
Attendees at Utah Business Revival events have touted First Amendment (speech, assembly, religion) rights, and apparently Second Amendments rights to keep and bear arms, too, as some have brandished weapons at these public rallies. Many attendees self-consciously ignore social distancing and mask requirements. I wonder if these distance-closers, along with the gun-toters, know they are actually on the wrong side of constitutional history?
An article on Sept. 3, 1886, in the New York Times details a meeting of the Louisiana State Board of Health at New Orleans. It relates how citizens of several states were enforcing state and local orders related to a yellow fever outbreak at Biloxi, Mississippi. “Shotgun quarantines are in full force at Ocean Springs, Bay St. Louis, and Mobile against the beleaguered Biloxians. Armed men board the trains to prevent any people who got on at Biloxi from alighting at these points.”
Apparently, our manly American ancestors were more interested in protecting the health and lives of their wives and children than their bank accounts.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross
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