No masks here.
Ohio State Rep. Nino Vitale is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore! He’s tired of all these liberals telling him how to live and talking about “public health”, and “bend the curve”, and “Hey, let’s do our very best not to kill Grandma, okay?”
“This is the greatest nation on earth founded on Judeo-Christian Principles,” the Urbana Republican wrote on his Facebook page. “One of those principles is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face. I will not wear a mask.”
Vitale’s Facebook account was recently disabled after he posted disinformation on the coronavirus, but he’s back online now, and The Huffington Post reports that Vitale posted a video expanding on his sacred obligation for all Christians to appear in public bare-faced during a pandemic.
“When we think of image, do we think of a chest or our legs or our arms?” he asked. “We think of their face. I don’t want to cover people’s faces, Jim. That’s the image of God right there and I want to see it in my brothers and sisters.”
Sadly, Ohioans won’t get to hear Vitale flesh out his no doubt deeply considered and well grounded First Amendment argument against bog standard public health measures. On Sunday, Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine rescinded his order that face masks be worn in stores to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus because so many of his constituents found the requirement “offensive.”
“It became clear to me that that was just a bridge too far. People were not going to accept the government telling them what to do,” DeWine told ABC’s “This Week.” Although he did suggest that it might be a nice gesture to wear one anyway, just to protect “the folks who are stocking shelves in grocery stores.”
Safe to say that Rep. Vitale will not be heeding that advice. After taking flack last week for calling the state’s Jewish public health chief Amy Acton the “unelected Globalist Health Director,” he was at it again yesterday, exhorting his Facebook followers to “ignore the unelected Dr. Acton’s orders, open your counties now, before it’s too late. This is not based on logic, this is based on fear and propaganda and every statistical, data driven study done in the last 2 weeks says death counts are low, the models were wrong, and this is more like the flu.”
Then he arglebargled some nonsense about public health measures requiring a two-thirds vote by the Ohio legislature and went back to shouting that Bill Gates “wants to lock us down and profit by charging us for mandatory vaccinations.”
Seems like it was possibly a bad idea to turn public health measures into another front in our never ending culture war? That maybe pretending that scientific experts were part of an evil cabal of globalist, socialist, communists trying to enslave Americans by not letting them die during a contagious pandemic was counterproductive?
Just kidding. LIBERATE OHIO, full steam ahead.
GOP Lawmaker Opposes Coronavirus Face Masks Because They Cover ‘The Image Of God’ [Huffington Post]
State rep. won’t wear mask because faces are the ‘likeness of God’ [Ohio Capital Journal]
Ohio State Rep. Nino Vitale Calls Dr. Amy Acton, Who is Jewish, a Globalist [Cleveland Scene]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.