Where do your rights end and the rights of others begin?

Here in Kansas City mask mandates are returning and some people don’t like that so they went down to City Hall to protest and wanted to get inside the building, but of course they weren’t wearing masks so they couldn’t get inside which you’d think they might have seen coming, but they didn’t, so bad planning on their part. Lots of that going around these days. The Kansas City Star said the protestors felt mask mandates were an “an affront on their civil liberties.”

OK, so let’s think our way through that position because I’m pretty sure the protestors didn’t.

Nobody is coming into anybody’s house and forcing them to put on masks.

They’re also not stopping people in the street and holding them down and supergluing masks to their faces, although if that policy changes and Dr. Anthony Fauci starts tasering offenders and forcibly applying masks while the offenders lie on the ground and vibrate, I wouldn’t mind seeing that so let’s hope somebody puts a video on YouTube.

As I was saying before I got sidetracked by my personal fantasies (which happens about 243 times a day on average)…

Nobody has to wear a mask.

Unless…

A non-mask wearing person wants to go into a government building or school or restaurant because those places have the right to set rules for their establishments, so that’s where your right to do whatever the hell you feel like ends and their rights begin.

According to the Insureon website (as near as I can figure they’re involved in providing insurance to small businesses) businesses have the right to refuse service as long as they can offer legitimate reasons for doing so and the rules are applied equally.

“No shoes, no shirt, no service” was decided to be constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the celebrated Tarzan v. Target case, a fact I just made up, but the fact that we all accepted certain rules for entering a business used to be no big deal until batshit crazy people started screaming about their non-existent rights on social media.  

Look at it from their point of view and those protesters are saying they have a right to come into a government building or school or restaurant and endanger other people’s health.

But in reality, you can run around without a mask all the live long day unless you want to go into somebody else’s building and then their rights take over.

Which reminds me of…

Prayer in schools

Nobody can stop you from praying silently at any time and in any location. And students are allowed to meet and pray on school grounds. Problems arise when you want to force other people to participate or listen to you pray.

I’d like to think Jesus got it right (at least for Christians…I mean his last name is right in there) when he described how people should pray:

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men … but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen.”

Jesus went on to say God didn’t bother with people who prayed in public because those people already got what they wanted: other people seeing just how religious they were. According to Jesus, God was a lot more likely to listen to people who prayed in private because those prayers were sincere.

Once again, think about it from the Prayer-In-Schools Advocates point of view and those people are saying you should be forced to listen to them pray, which ignores the fact that other people have a right to not have your religion shoved down their throats.

The First Amendment

Conservatives love to portray Liberals as overly-sensitive, easily-offended snowflakes and let’s be honest, in some cases they’re 100 percent right…which doesn’t stop Conservatives from squealing like a pig when their ox gets gored.

(Let’s all take a breather while you work through that mixed metaphor of barnyard animals I offered up in the last paragraph.)

In the meantime…

If you’re like me, you can’t hear the phrase “squeal like a pig” without thinking of Deliverance and Ned Beatty and just to make you a little more uncomfortable assuming that’s even possible, my personal theory is Burt Reynolds showed up early enough to keep Ned from being sodomized, but let it happen because Burt didn’t like Ned and only stepped in when his pal Jon Voight’s “purty mouth” was threatened.

(OK, clearly I’ve seen Deliverance way too often and have overly-vivid memories of that man-on-man rape scene which indicates a need for some kind of therapy that I don’t plan on getting so we both have to live with that.)

Anyway…

Easily-Offended Conservatives like to complain that social media platforms are censoring them and violating their First Amendment rights, a complaint that seems to indicate they’ve got a poor understanding of several Constitutional Amendments.

The First Amendment prevents Congress from limiting free speech, but does not require private businesses to let morons and fuckwits (which sounds like an Abercrombie & Fitch for low-IQ people and would be a huge success if it actually existed) use their platforms to spew misinformation.

After Donald Trump sued social media companies for violating his First Amendment rights, here’s what Paul Barret, an adjunct law professor and deputy director at New York University's Center for Business and Human Rights had to say:

"Trump has the First Amendment argument exactly wrong."

Barret described the lawsuits as "DOA," or dead on arrival, because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech, not the actions of private companies.

When someone complains that Twitter or Facebook won’t let them say whatever they want it’s pretty much like someone declaring they have a right to put a yard sign for the candidate of their choice in your yard and if you don’t want their sign in your yard, you’re violating their First Amendment Rights.

Today’s message

It’s pretty simple although people who are completely focused on themselves seem to have a hard time dealing with it: you don’t get to do whatever you want when it starts affecting other people.

So you can drive down to City Hall to protest and stand on the street and yell about your rights, but if you want to go inside, you need to put on a mask.

Other people have rights, too.