Covid-19 Restrictions and the Texas Blue Laws: A Comparison of Absurdities

I grew up in Texas in the 1960s and 70s, which meant I grew up with the Texas Blue Laws. My family told me they called the laws “blue” because they gave a person the blues. Some linguists say the color blue was derisively associated with the Puritans and their habit of shutting everything down except church on Sundays.

Texas had a weird plethora of statewide blue laws, plus any number of county blue laws piled on top of them. Liquor sales were, and still are, illegal on Sundays. In addition, Texas blue laws banned the sale of shoes, hardware, lawn mowers, clocks, watches, and toys.

Toys are the reason I have childhood memories of the blue laws. I didn’t understand why my parents were not allowed to buy me toys on Sundays, but they could bore me to death by shopping for furniture or antiques. Talk about a clearly unjust law from a kid’s perspective!

It really got weird for me when I turned 18 and was old enough to buy beer. (Yes, the drinking age in Texas was 18 from 1973 until Reagan threatened their highway funding if they wouldn’t raise the age to 21.) It was still illegal to buy beer on Sunday mornings because they wanted you to be in church, but you could after noon.

So I couldn’t buy shoes on Sunday afternoons, but I could buy beer. I couldn’t buy a hammer, but I could buy beer. I couldn’t buy a deck of playing cards, but I could buy beer.

This made no sense to me. It didn’t to most Texans, either, and department stores started openly defying the blue laws in the late 70s. Nobody wanted to enforce the stupid laws, and eventually the state legislature, in a rare bout of sanity, repealed most of them in 1985.

The veritable plethora of Covid restrictions across the United States today are every bit as ridiculous as those old blue laws. Some states close whole schools as soon as one or two kids test positive for Covid. That impacts working class parents one helluva lot more than blue laws ever did. At least blue laws never made a single mom scramble to find a daycare provider so she could go to work.

Other states don’t close the schools at all. Some cities require masks and vaccine passports just to get into a restaurant or tavern; here in Ohio it’s the business or government owner’s option. Needless to say, most governments require masks, but stores, restaurants and taverns don’t. Mainly it means that most Ohioans don’t wear masks much at all, and it’s nice for this old socialist to find himself in the majority for a change.

Here in the Cleveland area, the NFL’s ridiculous Covid policies became headline sports news after it was announced that 20 Browns players, including 11 starters, would be unable to play in today’s game against the Las Vegas Raiders.

One of those starters was the quarterback, Baker Mayfield, who challenged the effectiveness of the restrictions on Twitter. He just pointed out that the restrictions keep changing, and of course he wanted to play. It’s not like any of the players who tested positive have any symptoms whatsoever.

So the NFL changed their Covid rules to allow players to come back a day or two earlier than they previously did. Not only that, but they postponed the Browns/Raiders game to Monday afternoon to give players a better chance of playing. None of this had anything to do with slowing down the infection rate, much less the health of the NFL employees, ie the players.

What are these restrictions supposed to accomplish, anyway? We were originally told that they were to contain the spread of the Covid viruses until everybody got vaccinated and we had herd immunity and then the virus would be eradicated. We were also told to blame unvaccinated people for selfishly continuing to spread the virus.

Then it turned out that vaccinated people could spread the virus after all, and then the World Health Organization declared in September that the Covid virus had become endemic, would continue to mutate, everybody would get it sooner or later, and we were just going to have to figure out how to live with it, like we do with the ever-changing influenza viruses.

The WHO also noted that the newer strains were likely to become more infectious and less symptomatic over time, would eventually become just another nasty cold at worst, and that governments should think about this before announcing new mandates or restrictions.

The WHO didn’t come right out and say that what we now know about Covid makes the restrictions as silly as Monty Python’s Knights Who Say “Ni!”, but they certainly did make it scientifically reasonable to do so.

If the goal of the restrictions was to contain the virus, that goal is now unattainable. Judging by the daily emails I get at my county job every time some coworker tests positive for Covid, it’s pretty clear that their testing and masking and social distancing and cleaning aren’t containing it very much at all.

Furthermore, as soon as one leaves the county building, masks and social distancing are no longer required, and are largely unenforceable even in those states where they still are.

The silliness doesn’t stop there. My public library’s cut its hours so much it’s inconvenient for me to go, and when I do I have to wear a mask and can’t sit down and read a book or a magazine like I used to because they took all the chairs away to discourage people from staying.

I have to wear a mask to go to my HR department, but I don’t have to wear one in the grocery store. I have to wear a mask to go to the art museum, but none is required at the tavern down the street from it. Some school districts require masks for kids, others don’t.

Seems to me Covid restrictions are every bit as silly and as useless in accomplishing their purported objectives as the Texas blue laws ever were; if anything, the Covid restrictions are worse because they’re more intrusive and, in some states, coercive. They will also be increasingly ignored or defied as more and more people realize and resent their intrusive absurdity.

The thing is, a lot of people, mostly Democrats, intellectually and emotionally invested in the Covid restrictions as some sign of how pro-science or intellectually superior or highly ethical they were in contrast to maskless, knuckle-dragging Trumpers, and they don’t want to believe that they’ve been cucked into making a bunch of absurdities a part of their political ideology.

It would just be silly if Covid restrictions didn’t adversely impact so many people, or restrict their rights to freedom of assembly and association in the name of liberal pseudoscience. Unfortunately, the restrictions keep a lot of people scared, and give the authorities an excuse to call for lockdowns every time a new variant comes along during a time of growing social unrest.

This means the Covid restrictions are about power, control, and maybe looking good in some people’s social circles, but definitely not for the health of the general population. It also means people who support such restrictions are either ignorant of the science or willing enablers of authoritarianism for the “right kind of people.”

So much for their ethical superiority.

Thanks for reading, good night, and good luck.