In the summer of 2020, my church returned to in-person services after just under two months of virtual online presentations (and I'm using that word intentionally given that "presentations" is the extent to what any religious organization can offer when not gathering together). One of the things we immediately noticed was the influx of new faces – people who were desperate to follow the Scriptural command "not to give up meeting together," but were unable to do so with their own congregation.
One younger family began regularly attending with us specifically because our church had adopted a mask-optional approach in our services. I spoke with them on more than one occasion as they shared their appreciation for that decision. Their young son suffers from a speech and developmental disorder, causing him to not only rely heavily on facial and verbal cues in order to keep calm, but to struggle with expressing himself in any meaningful way with an encumbering face mask shielding his mouth.
They spoke often about how frustrating it had been for them to become societal outcasts thanks to the government and pop culture's obsessive harassment of anyone who objected to wearing porous cloth masks. Every time they tried to explain to a business, restaurant, grocery store, or even church about their child's condition and the necessary exemption he had been granted from the government, they were met with skeptical glares and abject refusal. In one incident, they were humiliated by the applause of fellow patrons when a manager screamed them out of the building for "not caring about other customers."
Their own church began meeting in person again later that summer and, quite reasonably, they returned home to worship. I think about them whenever I see stories like the one that just appeared in the The Atlantic, vindicating their claims and indicting the horrible manner in which so many in our society treated them:
While that's a good question, the answer is obvious: speech therapists likely saw what was happening culturally to their patients – scolded as unloving narcissists who were too selfish to sacrifice for the common good – and decided they weren't interested in sauntering in front of that judgmental firing squad.
So now that we are living in a society where those that pushed this abusive narrative are doing their best Homer-Simpson-slip-behind-the-hedges routine, I'm curious about something. In a culture that loves hearing itself talk about "justice" – whether it's racial justice, social justice, environmental justice, and so on – when, precisely, will there be "justice" for that lovely family that visited my church?
- Now that the CDC has acknowledged the reality that cloth masks were ineffective to stop the spread of airborne COVID…
- Now that entertainment elites write and perform little skits making light of the very mask-abuse they promoted and amplified against…
- Now that the same governmental leaders who authored the unnecessary laws and enforced the harmful guidelines have now themselves demonstrated on national television they no longer see them as useful…
- Now that Hollywood stars and music moguls have dropped their own charade and paraded through packed stadiums without the masks they so frequently endorsed on social media…
- Now that the president has gone silent after using his bully pulpit to hang guilt and shame around the neck of everyone who dared to point to evidence questioning his administration's mitigation decrees…
- Now that the architect of so many of these rigid yet inconsistent, intrusive yet arbitrary policies, who crowned himself the personification of science itself has seemingly been intentionally removed from the public eye entirely…
Isn't it time for some heads to roll? Isn't it time for fair-minded people with any shred of moral conscience to forget criticizing the governor who tells kids to stop wearing pointless and harmful masks and start holding the governors, legislators, mayors, superintendents, and school boards who bullied vulnerable kids into strapping them to their faces?
For that sweet Christian boy whose parents I got to know almost 2 years ago, and the thousands upon thousands of kids like him and parents like them – people who our society abused just to get high off the toxic fumes of its own virtue-signaling moral superiority – I vote yes.
