In an article by Fox 13 News, Rep. Adam Robertson, R-Provo states, “I very much appreciate that he’s [Gov. Gary Herbert] not trying to mandate on his own. That would not go over well with myself or my colleagues. ... When we get a government mandate, we have something edging dangerously towards a police state.”
How Robertson leaps from a mask-mandate to a police state when he helped overturn the voice of the people regarding our Prop 3 Medicaid expansion is difficult to imagine.
Like most of our state legislators, Robertson is embarrassingly bereft of rational thought. Most Utah County residents do not wear masks when they are in public, either because they are misinformed or because they willfully lack respect for others.
We all want the economy to function and for school to resume in the fall, but as so many Utahans refuse to wear masks, if the governor does not mandate them, we will soon be in as bad a situation as California and Arizona.
Research shows that masks can prevent an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19 from spreading the disease to vulnerable people. When smoking inside public buildings was banned to protect people from second-hand smoke did anyone fear a police state? When a tanker overturns on the freeway and traffic has to be stopped to protect commuters for a day, do we fear government overreach?
As citizens of Utah we should be more concerned about the opinions of experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Angela Dunn than of our state legislators, and so should Herbert. The hubris of Roberston is just another example of Republicans putting political power and status before science and research — which is why the U.S. is now reporting eight times higher the number of new cases of COVID-19 per day than Europe.
Tamara Pace Thomson, Provo
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