Segregation

More than fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, America still struggles with segregation.  Irrational restrictions of freedoms are imposed on unfavored groups by those in power.  Is it legal?  Yes, unfortunately it is.  But it is not right.

First, some factchecks.  The idea that vaccinated individuals cannot contract COVID-19 is false.  The idea that vaccinated individuals cannot spread COVID-19 is false.  We know these ideas are false by the scientific method which compares ideas such as these to real-world observations.  We have several notable counterexamples.  President Biden, Jill Biden, Anthony Fauci, and Justin Trudeau all recently contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated and up to date with boosters.  Anyone who contracts COVID-19 can spread it to others regardless of vaccination status.  To believe that vaccinated individuals cannot contract COVID-19 or spread it to others is to deny science.

Why did vaccines not produce promised protection?  There are many reasons.  For example, these have always been leaky vaccines.  But even more compelling, all vaccines and boosters available today target a virus that no longer exists.  COVID-19 vaccine targets were mapped in January 2020.  The virus has mutated many times since then.  Anyone who received these vaccines are potential transmitters of the current virus.  There is no scientific basis for segregation of the unvaccinated.

Yet segregation exists.  For example, there is a large health care system that prevents some unvaccinated physicians from practicing medicine in its hospitals by terminating their medical staff membership and privileges.  It acts summarily, without due process, and without regard to appropriately submitted religious exemption petitions, the same religious exemption petitions which were accepted by other major health systems in the area.

Another example.  As part of its back-to-the-office initiative, a major area employer has corralled unvaccinated employees into a single floor, forbidding them to visit to any other floor of their downtown office building.

Although these actions are irrational and unscientific, they are legal.  In Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. — (2022),the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the CMS vaccine mandate, giving health care systems broad authority to adjudicate religious or health exemptions for workers who do not wish to be vaccinated.  Similarly, employers have broad legal authority to impose restrictions on employees, even irrational ones, so long as those restrictions are not based on a federally protected status such as race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  We have been here before.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the practice of segregation by race so long as separate accommodations were equal, which, of course, they never were.  Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers had broad legal authority to impose restrictions on employees, even irrational ones, even restrictions based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Now, as then, misinformation fuels these irrational policies.  Now, as then, the same irrational arguments are heard: “Those people are unclean”; “They spread disease”; “It’s in their genes.”

Now, as then, legal does not make right.  Unscientific segregation, coerced consent, and irrational discrimination are unethical.  These are the methods of bullies and lynch mobs, not freedom loving patriots.

If you have been the victim of segregation, please share your story in the comments below.  The readers of this blog want to hear from you.