Marissa's musings about liberty, individual rights, justice, grief, loss, and other random things
Thank you, Rep. Higgins, for stating this truth so perfectly.
No person should ever need to provide a reason or justification for refraining from receiving a medical procedure.
Refraining from receiving a medical procedure is a fundamental right. Period. Full stop. End of story.
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Source here
Very well-said:
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Source: Being Libertarian, via Instagram
Exactly! It’s the double standards and logical inconsistency that are so infuriating. It makes no sense for people to be outraged when government workers lose their jobs, but not when private sector workers lose their jobs. This is especially true when the private sector workers lost their jobs due to regulations that government workers created and implemented.
There are some great comments on the post which deserve to be quoted as well:
“Remember when Biden said people fired for not taking the vaccine could find another job? Well I’m sure the bureaucrats can find another job.”
“The fact that people I once called friends are boo-hooing about federal workers who held jobs which never should’ve existed and not the millions of people who lost jobs, homes, or businesses due to the actions of the regulatory agencies those workers worked for…sickens me.”
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100%. And just in case it needs to be repeated, declining a medical procedure does not ever make someone a bad person. Period. Full stop. No exceptions.
Always something worth pointing out:
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The claim that “no one was forced to take it” is a particularly egregious lie.
On February 15, President Trump signed what is perhaps his most awesome executive order yet. It withholds federal funds from schools that force their students to receive the covid vaccine.
According to the text of the order on the White House website:
“It is the policy of my Administration that discretionary Federal funds should not be used to directly or indirectly support or subsidize an educational service agency, State educational agency, local educational agency, elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education that requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend any in-person education program.”
Trump’s order correctly points out that people should be “empowered with accurate data” and “left free to make their own decisions accordingly,” and that “threatening to shut them out of an education is an intolerable infringement on personal freedom.”
This really shouldn’t be a revolutionary concept. The right to make medical decisions about one’s body is the most fundamental right that there is. And vaccine mandates violate this right. It’s completely unacceptable for any school, employer, or organization to require a medical procedure.
With this executive order, Trump has decided that the federal government will step in and defend people’s rights from schools that would violate them. This is exactly what the federal government should be doing. In fact, it’s what the federal government should have been doing all along.
Despicably, the Biden administration attempted to use the power of OSHA – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration – to force all companies with 100 or more employees to implement vaccine mandates, thereby violating the rights of their employees. This is the literal opposite of what the government should have done. The government should have banned companies from violating the rights of their employees, not required it. Now, under the Trump administration, the government is moving in the direction of what it should have been doing all along. It is punishing institutions that violate people’s rights, thereby providing a deterrent from doing so.
I can’t think of a more important or worthy use of the power of the federal government, than to enforce people’s rights to bodily autonomy. So thank you, President Trump, for standing up for the fundamental right to decline medical intervention.
Defiant L’s captured this horrible tweet back from the times when the federal government was attempting to force all people to undergo a medical procedure:
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Even now, four years later, this tweet is infuriating.
Yes, protesting against a policy that forces people to undergo a medical procedure against their will is “soooo STUPID.” God forbid that people, you know, stand up for their fundamental rights. God forbid that people fight back against policies that are morally wrong. Can’t have that. Obviously, when something violates people’s rights and is blatantly immoral, people should just accept it and not make any attempt to fight back against it in any way. Obviously, forcing people to undergo a medical procedure against their will is perfectly fine.
Not.
The fact that somebody could think this way is incomprehensible to me. It is admirable and courageous that airline workers put their jobs on the line to stand up for their right to bodily autonomy. To look at this situation and call the airline workers’ actions “soooo STUPID” is despicable, idiotic, and insulting. Any person who thinks this way is truly stupid.
“The people who championed lockdowns are now very sincerely concerned about ‘concentrated power,'” points out Dave Smith in this Instagram post.
He makes an astute point. And I also feel the need to point out that, even worse than lockdowns, these very same people also championed requiring people to undergo vaccines and medical testing. Their hypocrisy would be humorous if it weren’t so infuriating.
New York Jets (and former Green Bay Packers) quarterback Aaron Rodgers recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and shared his views on vaccine mandates and standing up for what he believes in.
“I’m going to continue talking about this because it’s important to me. I don’t want the memories to be lost. I don’t want what I went through to get brushed over… Look at my situation, I lost friends, allies in the media, millions of dollars in sponsorship because I talked about what worked for me in my own beliefs and my own health reasons why I didn’t get vaccinated.”
I agree with Rodgers 100%. It seems that, for the most part, people have forgotten about the violations of people’s fundamental rights that were committed in the name of fighting the Covid pandemic. I will never forget the fact that my hometown of Boston decided that people like me would not be allowed into restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters, museums, or other indoor public places. The signs in restaurant windows, announcing that proof of vaccination was required to enter, will forever be seared into my memory. This policy was immoral and wrong. The people who enacted it should not be allowed to just continue with their lives, and move on to other issues, with no negative consequences.
Rodgers is right. The memories should never be lost. Violating people’s rights should never be brushed over.
Rodgers continued:
“You stand for something, you stand courageously for what you believe in or the opposite side of that is saying nothing or being a coward. I wasn’t willing to do that. Say whatever you want about the way I went about doing it…
In the end, I believe what I did and what I stand for is a tough position to be in. But I think it’s (an) important responsibility to continue to speak up and use my voice to give other people the permission to stand up as well because there’s a lot of people that believe a lot of the things that I believe in that don’t have the opportunity to do it, don’t have the courage to do it, don’t have the platform to do it in. I feel like I can speak for some of those people and hold the line to some of those people regardless what crosshairs that puts me in with certain media members.”
I absolutely love these sentiments.
Amen.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the article about Rodgers and Rogan’s interview, which was originally published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and also published on Yahoo News, demonstrated the bias that is typical of media outlets.
The article states:
“Rodgers claimed that people ‘didn’t do critical thinking’ during the pandemic and alleged that ‘as more research comes out, there’s more papers published in very reputable scientific publications that talk about all of the things I was stumping for and talking about.’ What exact scientific publications he was referring to wasn’t clear.”
The fact that people didn’t do critical thinking during the pandemic is not merely something that Rodgers is claiming; it is true. Far too many people failed to think critically during the pandemic, as demonstrated by the widespread enactment of, and public support for, policies that violate people’s rights.
It’s also unnecessary to mention that it is unclear which scientific publications Rodgers refers to. The author could have simply omitted this sentence. It doesn’t add any information or explanation but is merely the author’s way of expressing his skepticism of, and disdain for, Rodgers. And expressing one’s opinions or feelings about the subject of an article is exactly what journalists should avoid doing.
Another thing mentioned in the article is that Rodgers lost his weekly appearances on “The Pat McAfee Show” due to his controversy with Jimmy Kimmel. This angers me, because Rodgers didn’t do anything wrong and does not deserve to be punished in any way for his comments on Kimmel. As I explained in an earlier post, Kimmel is the one who behaved wrongly in this situation, and therefore the one who deserves to be punished. Kimmel deserves to lose his late-night talk show more than Rodgers deserves to lose his radio appearances.