The West Virginia Legislature, under a Republican supermajority, is fast-tracking a bill that would ban schools from requiring students to wear masks in the midst of a pandemic, again laying bare the hypocrisy that the GOP is somehow supportive of small government.
As the start of the 2021-22 school year loomed, West Virginia was going through its worst spike in COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic more than a year prior.
Gov. Jim Justice decided there would be no color-coded maps to determine whether schools could conduct classes in person and participate in extracurricular activities this time around. There would be no statewide public health mandates whatsoever. Justice deemed that “local control†was the best policy. Individual school boards should decide whether students wore masks. Individual businesses should determine the same, and whether vaccines or testing should be required.
While this holds with the idea of big government staying out of things, Justice probably did it as a deflection, so school boards and business owners would bear the brunt of complaints from angry anti-vaxxers and other, seemingly willingly misinformed, people who have bought into the politicization of the pandemic, masks and vaccines.
And that’s more or less what happened. Of course, some of the angry voices reached Justice anyway, so he convened a special session for the Legislature to pass a bill allowing for exemptions from employer policies that require proof of vaccination or frequent testing, undermining his statements about local control.
Now, in its regular session, the Legislature is taking the political culture war one step further in trying to keep schools from requiring masks, despite the fact that children are now just as susceptible to COVID-19 as adults, thanks to various mutations of the virus, and schools are a petri dish for any type of bug in the most normal of times. Many schools have masking policies and keep track of outbreaks, while others are pretending the virus doesn’t exist. That’s a product of the environment in each district. School boards that take student health more seriously have adopted stricter policies. Those that see the virus as a political matter haven’t been as cautious.
The GOP-controlled Legislature has decided it needs to further politicize the pandemic by enacting a law that ultimately would make schools less safe for students, teachers and staff while the pandemic is once again raging as bad as it was in the late summer. The only reason they’re doing this is to strike a blow in a political war, the health of children and those who would try to educate them be damned.
Some who favor taking away a school’s power over masking say they’re still on the side of small government, because this would make masking a personal choice. That’s a flimsy excuse, and everyone, including the legislators pushing this bill, know it.
Leaders in the West Virginia Republican Party are only for local control so long as it does not conflict with other so-called ideals, even if it means putting their own health and that of their constituents at risk.
Looking at much of the legislative agenda so far in this session, it’s clear the state GOP, much like its national counterpart, is no longer a party of conservative principles or policy, but a group whose members only know how to scream about identity politics, to the detriment of everyone in West Virginia.
