Thread:

There are two large non-denominational #churches in my #SanDiego suburb. One is taking a cautious approach to services, the other is not and adding in political advocacy to that end as well. I am an active member of the former. #covid19

Without adding to the piling on of either side of this debate, the way I think about things on this is pretty clear. People and organizations are not equal partners in #pandemic response. Pandemics are systems of numbers and scale.

Organizations that facilitate large gatherings can have a disproportionate impact on success or failure of pandemic response. And while it's pretty clear we can't stop people from behaving the way they want, and we can't even really stop places like churches from operating...

...without doing things we don't appear to want to do (send in the police to a church) than it's kind of on organizations to do the right thing, even if they can't be forced. Which should be something freedom loving Americans agree with. Free choice means...

...that church can do what it wants, to include hosting indoor, un-masked, non-socially distanced gatherings and posting videos of it on social media during a pandemic. I'm free then to say that's bad for my neighborhood. And I'm not going to ever be a member of that church...

....and I'm going to stay clear of the folks that are for the next few months. And I'll remember how they handled their business when the community needed them to be a little better for as long as I am here and an active member of the community.

But this does nothing at all to solve the health risk this church is causing in my neighborhood though. And the gap left over is where we ought to not have to rely on the government for groups to do the right thing. But we often have to, because they don't. The church is doing...

...the wrong thing. And politicizing it and eroding social cohesion when we need it most. This makes us more reliant on gov to enforce laws we shouldn't need. The road to gov overreach is paved with the bad choices of organizations that couldn't be trusted to do the right thing.

All this is to say that groups that don't do the right thing when it's their choice infringe on our liberties...often in the name of liberty. Churches are pretty good at hypocrisy.