The first thing that struck me was how closely the opinion parallels a recent blog post by Edward Feser. Checking Stickman's background, he received both his undergraduate and law degrees from Duquesnae University, a Catholic institution. The opinion, 66 pages long, highly detailed and closely reasoned, echoes Feser, a neo-Scholastic:
There is also the fact that, as I have argued before, lockdowns involve actions that, under ordinary circumstances, would be gravely unjust. Human beings have a natural right to labor in order to provide for themselves and their families. They have a natural right to gather together for religious worship. They have a natural right to decide how best to educate their children. They have a natural right to the liberty of action involved in ordinary day-to-day social activities. They have a natural right to the stability and predictability necessary for long-range planning, which the rule of law is supposed to guarantee. Interference with these normal human activities and goods causes grave harm. Hence, while they can in principle be temporarily suspended when absolutely necessary in an emergency, there is a strong presumption against this. The burden of proof is always on government to demonstrate that interference with these goods is strictly necessary, and not on citizens to show that such interference is unnecessary.Interestingly, yet again, the blogs of highly prestigious constitutional law professors Glenn Reynolds and Willaim A Jacobson contain no useful commentary on the decision. (I tried a search for "Stickman" on Reynolds's blog and came up empty. Jacobson has a single, bare-bones entry nowhere near the quality of YouTube commmentaries by far less presitigous lawyers.)So, again, “Do lockdowns work?” is the wrong question. The right question is: “Do we know with moral certainty that lockdowns are strictly necessary to prevent the potential harms of the virus, and that those harms are greater than the aggregate of harms that the lockdowns themselves cause?” And I submit that we know no such thing, and that continued lockdowns are, accordingly, unjustifiable and tyrannical.
What are the specific next steps in the appeal? How is the appeals court likely to respond? Did Stickman tailor his opinion in such a way to encourage the US Supreme Court to hear this case, as opposed to earlier COVID religious freedom cases that it declined to hear? So far, I've heard no informed opinion.
Meanwhile, just yesterday, a group of anti-mask protesters marched through a Fort Lauderdale, FL Target chanting, "take off your mask".
“Who here is sick and tired of having to wear one of these things every time you go into a store,” said a man. “Now, here is the bottom line: if someone wants to wear a mask going to a grocery store, then let them wear a mask, but how is it that if their mask is working that I have to wear one, too?”From there, they went into the store where they removed their masks and began playing the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister while marching through the store shouting at customers telling them to take off their masks.
