The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, sir, it is a miracle, a MIRACLE! I tell ya, how religion has come to the unvaccinated. Now that the Governor of our fair state and the President of our In God We Trust country have mandated Covid shots for all government workers, suddenly the filings for personal exemptions have surged faster than the plague caseload itself. Cops, firefighters, social service workers, bus drivers, even nurses and doctors, all those folks who, for whatever reason before, ignored the pleas to please get a vaccination, please wear a mask, please maintain social distancing, now are petitioning the State or their employers to exempt them for … wait for it … religious reasons. Please, Mr. President, don’t make me take that inoculation. My religion opposes vaccines.

Somewhere in their Bibles or their Quran or maybe their Book of Mormon , there’s an admonition, probably punishable by eternal damnation, against injecting alien substances into their inviolable and holy selves. Nothing, probably, against horse dewormer, but a vaccine, no way! Against the will of God, an affront to Allah. Get back, Beelzebub!! The road to salvation is not littered with empty syringes, but the road to Hell must be, that much is certain.

Personally, now that I’ve befouled my mortal coil with god only knows what alien substances, I can’t, for the life of me, understand this antipathy for an immunity to a disease that has killed two thirds of a million of us and sickened more than 40 million, some who will suffer long term effects. If polio or smallpox made a resurgence, or some new flesh eating monstrous disease suddenly appeared, is this the response we would expect? Maybe Covid isn’t scary enough. Maybe the sight of strangers struggling to breathe on ventilators isn’t frightening to these folks. Maybe they haven’t had a relative die yet in an overloaded hospital, no visitors allowed, just a lonely isolated death. Maybe their imaginations can’t quite conjure that vision. Or … they just don’t give a damn. Maybe they need an Ebola virus that devours flesh and turns it putrid, something so godawful not even their religious beliefs would stop them from taking whatever nano-tracking, magnetizing, pregnancy ending vaccine was offered.

I give up understanding these people, I really do. And I won’t waste breath reasoning with them. I don’t think you can. So it’s fine with me to mandate getting a shot or getting fired, go work for Burger King. Be all right with me if clinics and hospitals refused to give these suddenly devout yahoos entry. You folks plugged our ICU’s, filled our wards, kept others from getting the care they need. Harsh, I know, and we won’t do that,but don’t ask for a religious exemption and don’t expect to get one. Your religion is a little thin and a bit newfound. Mine says respect life. And here’s one last piece of advice for you who have found holiness at this late date: Trumpism isn’t a religion. Probably just the opposite.

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