The Leader of North Carolina’s Re-Open Protest Now Has COVID-19 Obviously

While the majority of Americans are following their state’s stay at home orders, there are of course those who choose to be willfully ignorant of our reality. Reopen protests have cropped up in several states, where angry protesters march with American flags and demand their right to get haircuts and Baskin Robbins.

And given that protests are essentially crowds of people standing closely together and breathing the same air, it’s no surprise that they can be hotbeds of contamination. Which brings us to Audrey Whitlock, an organizer for North Carolina’s ReOpenNC protest, who recently revealed that she tested positive for COVID-19.

In a post on her group’s Facebook page, Whitlock wrote that she was “asymptomatic, … The test came back positive for COVID and negative for the antibodies, so I had a CDC test performed.” Since then she has been in quarantine and hasn’t attended the group’s rallies, but plans to do so once her quarantine ends.

In a long Facebook post, Whitlock wrote, “I have been told not to participate in public or private accommodations as requested by the government, and therefore denied my 1st amendment right of freedom of religion.” She failed to elaborate on how exactly the stay at home orders violated her religion, likely because they didn’t, because that’s not how the First Amendment works.

UNC law professor William Marshall weighed in on the situation, saying “When you have a potential of infecting others, you’re not just talking about putting yourself in danger. You’re talking about putting other people in danger, and that’s when I think the state has a legitimate interest to act to prevent the spread of that disease.”

One mainstay of these Re-Open protests is the presence of guns, and it’s not just because America is a country enamored of firearms. The same people who vehemently oppose gun control and cling to the 2nd Amendment are the same people who claim that social distancing infringes on their personal freedoms.

It’s all part of the same toxic belief system: that my right to own guns and spread disease are somehow greater than other people’s rights to live. It’s a deeply selfish way to think and to live, made worse by the fact that these people are wholly unwilling to compromise because “freedom”.

It’s the very same thinking that shrugs when children die in school shootings, that screams in the face of exhausted doctors and nurses. Is it any surprise then, that this deeply narcissistic fringe delivered the most soulless and malignant president this country has ever seen?

If you want to die for a perceived fight for freedom, that’s your choice. But you don’t get to take the rest of the country down with you.

(via CBS17, image: screencap/The News & Observer)

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