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Dear Editor:
This is a message to the anti-maskers who are claiming that requiring them to wear masks impinges on their personal freedom.
The constitutional rights argument against mandatory protective face masks is fallacious reasoning that flows from the same irrational reasoning conspiracy theorists use to promote the false notion that the virus is fake news manufactured by anti-Trumpers. The friends and families of the nearly 150,000 people in this country who have died from this virus would profoundly disagree with this claim.
Constraints on personal freedom abound in civil society to control the behavior of people who can't, or won't, control themselves. We have laws against smoking in public, excess alcohol consumption and operating a motor vehicle, speeding, jay-walking, assaulting and shooting other people, and so on. Each of these laws to protect public safety can be construed as an infringement on individual rights, but the reality is that they are necessary to protect the general public from the stupidity of those self-centered individuals among us for whom the common good and concern for others has so little meaning they willfully endanger other people's lives.
Additionally, certain jobs and some schools require uniforms; public schools and churches have dress codes; restaurants have "no shirt, no shoes, no service" regulations; and public nudity is, thankfully, forbidden. All of these are constraints on personal freedom.

Resisting wearing a 75-cent mask in public to protect ourselves and others from contracting a highly contagious, deadly illness that has infected 4 million Americans is senseless, outrageously irresponsible behavior. We do not now have, and never have had, a constitutional right to put other people's lives in danger as a matter of claiming personal freedom or simply because we don't like being told what to do. Those who think otherwise are prolonging the pandemic, further harming the economy, keeping America in last place in terms of effective pandemic management, and most of all, are flat-out wrong.
If you don't want to wear a protective mask, then stay home. Everything is not all about you.
Paula Dáil
Spring Green