F*ck Your Religious Exemption

Schools that don’t enforce mask mandates need to be sued into oblivion

The parent trots up to the principal with a combative look on her face. She hands the principal a letter. “This is for you and the school board.”

The letter says that even though the parent’s child is still recovering from COVID, the parent thinks he has a right to send the child to school. “I wish to exercise my religious exemption to your quarantine policy.”

Sometimes the principal does the right thing and sends the child home, but usually this is only after confirming that course of action with a lawyer. In the meantime, the infected child is wandering around the playground breathing plague breath on my kids.

My kid goes home, gets sick, has complications from COVID and dies because some religious jerk decided to make reasonable safety protocols political.

The whole concept of the religious exemption makes absolutely no sense. We have rules for a reason. A carte blanche to simply disregard rules because some people think they have a divine right to be unreasonable has no place in our legal philosophy.

It’s time for the rest of us to take the only avenue available. If a school recognizes a concept like the religious exemption and puts your children at risk, you have to sue them into oblivion. You have a case.

Only white people get the religious exemption

Imagine if a black man tried to do the same trick and send an infected child to school. Do you think the principal would shoot him on the spot or they’d wait for the police to arrive?

If you’re a member of a non-privileged race, you can’t even utter the phrase “religious exemption” without being laughed out of the room. It’s a sloppy legal concept designed to be misapplied.

Like most things plaguing modern society, the religious exemption isn’t something that the Founding Fathers put in the constitution.

While resistance to vaccine mandates goes back 200 years, religious objections were not recognized by the law until the 1960s. Since then, the use of these exemptions has proliferated across the U.S., including here in Illinois. More recently some states, including Illinois, have proposed or passed legislation to limit the use of religious exemptions. And some public health advocates say it’s simply become a loophole and a relatively easy way for people to opt out of vaccine mandates — Andrew Meriwether

Essentially, it’s just a way to say “The rules don’t apply to me.”

You aren’t allowed to have a child sacrifice and say “Oh, but it’s because of my religion.”

You aren’t allowed to disobey speed limits because, “God says I can speed.”

The whole concept of a religious exemption is so fundamentally asinine that it should never have been taken seriously in a courtroom.

Why are we burdened with this? The only result is that our children and our communities have to suffer. If you don’t like the laws of the United States, you don’t get to pick which ones you live by. You don’t get to say, “Those laws apply to everyone else but not to me!” Get out of here! We don’t want you here! You should be in jail! Quit killing our children!

Sue schools that fail to enforce mask mandates

I’ve been saying this for a while. Parents have a right to know that their children are safe. You shouldn’t have to worry about sending your child to school to die.

I wrote an article insisting that teachers need to be vaccinated. I don’t want my child in a classroom with an unvaccinated teacher.

But it’s not just the teachers. My daughter often comes home complaining about kids either refusing to wear masks, or wearing them around their chin.

We have a mechanism set up to combat this. Make a record of the children that are not complying with the rule. If somebody gets sick in that classroom, the children that carried in the virus should be held legally responsible.

This virus isn’t a joke. People are dying. When somebody does something that results in the death of your child, that’s criminal negligence. They should be held responsible.

I’ve been predicting that lawsuits are going to happen. Conservatives have been criminally irresponsible since this pandemic began. They have been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths. They’re banking on the belief that it’s difficult to trace the infection back to them. Yes, it is difficult, but it’s not impossible.

A mother in Fall Creek has filed a federal lawsuit against the Fall Creek School District after her children contracted COVID-19.

According to court documents filed Monday, the lawsuit says the district and board failed to implement reasonable COVID-19 mitigation measures, throwing her children and the rest of the students “into the snake pit” needlessly and recklessly endangered their health and safety — Lawsuit filed against Fall Creek School District over COVID-19 policies

Some people are going to read that and make inane arguments suggesting that suing the local school district will only hurt the local children. “You’re taking educational funding!” they’ll say.

Well, maybe so. But it’s not going to hurt the children as much as letting religious jerks slaughter the innocent because they feel entitled to their legally fraudulent religious exemption.

Nobody is above the law

The only problem with all of this is that the court system moves horribly slow and only moves at all for people with almost limitless funds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the government or some other agency financed these lawsuits? The concept of the religious exemption radicalizes your neighbor into a plague spewing community terrorist. It’s getting people killed. It’s prolonging the pandemic. It does nothing but hurt our society in a number of ways.

No, you don’t have the right to commit human sacrifice.

No, you don’t have the right to discriminate.

No, you don’t have the right to be a freeloader who doesn’t pay taxes.

We have a fundamental idea in our nation called rule of law. It means that everybody must obey the same set of rules. The idiotic concept of a religious exemption was conceived to give certain irresponsible people special privileges. The growing death count of the pandemic is just one of many proofs that demonstrate why the religious exemption is incompatible with a civilized society.