Where did these prohibitions come from? They have come from the ever-changing edicts of governors and mayors, who rely on the ever-changing evaluations of medical data from an ever-changing cast of scientific experts. They are the pronouncements of politicians who have forgotten that they are elected to enforce laws, not to write them, and to be the servants of the people, not their masters.
Why do Americans accept this? We are a nation born in a bloody revolution against a king. The founders of America made the profound and indisputable choice of establishing a government dedicated to the cacophony of liberty over the illusion of safety.
They embedded that choice in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former states, unequivocally, that no government is legitimate without the consent of the governed and that government's principal duty is to secure our rights.
The latter which expressly protects the right to make personal choices is the supreme law of the land, and thus all governmental acts are subordinate to it.
We have fought wars against tyrants who wanted to tell us how to live. Today, we have elected our masters who are doing just that.
Americans seem to accept the restrictions on our rights to speech, religion, travel and commercial activities simply because the origin of those restrictions is a popularly elected person. But even an elected government can be tyrannical.
Should you bow to these restrictions merely because their authors were elected and they have persuaded your neighbors that the prohibitions are for their own good the Declaration and the Constitution be damned?
Stated differently, the governments that have interfered with our well-established rights to go about our daily lives as we see fit taking chances whenever we cross the street, drink a glass of water, bite into food, sit next to a stranger on a train or at a baseball game, or go through a green light in our vehicles have failed their first obligation, which is to safeguard our freedoms to take those chances.
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