On December 2, Elkhart followed St. Joseph County (Indiana) in passing an ordinance that would issue fines to businesses who fail to enforce the county mask ordinance. The fines apply to both customers and employees. The business can be fined for the actions of both parties.
Mask ordinances, particularly those with fines, have real constitutional issues. Many legal and constitutional experts have weighed in on this in recent months. Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill also believes there are constitutional issues.
Beyond the legal arguments, issuing fines for violating mask ordinances has proven completely ineffective everywhere in the United States. For example, New Mexico has had a state mandate to wear masks since May. Mandatory fines were announced on July 1, 2020. Since then, the daily cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in the state has gone from about 12,000 a day to 108,000 a day. The mandate and the fines haven’t worked at all.
Quite literally, all the fines do is piss people off and cause tension between citizens and government officials. It’s more ‘busy work’ for politicians to make it seem like they are trying everything they can to control the virus. In politics, if you can’t fix a problem, you blame someone else for making it impossible for you to fix it. That sums up our entire COVID response and strategy right now. In reality, there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing any of us can do, except take solace in the fact that the overwhelming majority of us aren’t at serious risk from the virus, and try to protect those who are as best we can.
Mask fines haven’t worked throughout the US because mask mandates haven’t worked in the US or anywhere else in the world for that matter. The same goes for Michiana. Not because people aren’t wearing their mask, but because masks don’t work against an airborne virus. I’ve proven this for months with peer-reviewed science on the issue going back to 2009.
People in Elkhart are wearing their masks. Very few don’t. The virus is still spreading. Just as it’s still spreading everywhere in the world where people wear their masks all the time without fail.
The government, however, has no answer on how to make things better. So they blame a fictional boogeyman … the non-mask wearer in order to avert public outcry directed at them. ‘If only those three people would wear a mask!’
The Sheriff doesn’t want his deputies in the middle of a political fight with cult-like dogma being hurled in every direction. I don’t blame him.
Beyond that, not allowing his department to become the Thinkpol of Oceania should settle citizen worries of police abuse, at least in the county.
