Cerabino: Florida’s COVID-19 anti-mask protesters need to abort their messaging

The people who are trying to turn mandatory mask rules into a civil-rights struggle are going to need a better slogan.

As the numbers of COVID-19 infections are spiking in Florida, local governments are enacting emergency orders that require face masks, and that has spawned a backlash.

In Palm Beach County, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of four residents who claim that covering their noses and mouths while in close contact with others in public interferes with their “personal liberty, and constitutional rights, including but not limited to freedom of speech, right to privacy, in addition to the constitutionally protected right to enjoy and defend life and liberty.”

Here’s how one of the Palm Beach County protesters explained it.

“We are against, not masks, but mandatory masks,” he said. “We believe that it is our body, our choice.”

Those words echoed in Seminole County this past week, as anti-mask protesters marched down the street, chanting, “My body, my choice!”

If that slogan sounds familiar, it’s because it has been chanted for decades by women who oppose restrictions on the Constitutionally-protected right to an abortion.

So, this might be a good point to explore the difference between getting an abortion and wearing a face mask.

Abortion has been a legal medical procedure in the United States since 1973. The “choice”, in the context of abortion, is one a woman makes for her pregnancy.

The consequences of that decision made by the woman doesn’t affect the people standing next to her, by chance, in the supermarket checkout line.

If she chooses to have an abortion, it doesn’t kill your parents, shut down your business, or close your beach.

And if you’re a woman who comes within six feet of another woman who had an abortion, your ovaries will be unchanged.

In contrast, whether or not to wear a face mask during an airborne-spread virus pandemic, is a decision with implications that potentially affects an ever-expanding circle of people.

It’s a public, not private, decision.

Twisting that sensible public precaution into something devious and un-American on a personal level requires some verbal gymnastics.

For example, the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Palm Beach County mask protesters refers to face masks as “harmful medical devices.”

This takes a bit of imagination. If wearing masks hamper the spread of potentially airborne droplets of the virus to other people -- as medical experts say they do -- then they are the opposite of harmful.

And it’s worth noting that the local emergency mask order spells out that you don’t have to wear a mask if covering your nose and mouth is unsafe for you due to a medical condition “such as, but not limited to, asthma, COPD,” or “other conditions that reduce breathing or lung capacity.”

So, if the mask truly is medically harmful to you, then you don’t have to wear one. So, scratch the “harmful” excuse for everyone else.

And calling a face mask a “medical device,” well, that’s like calling your shoe “sole callus removal therapy.”

The anti-mask protesters are putting way too much mustard on this. They may want to dial it back and revamp the messaging.

I’d start with fixing that misappropriation of the abortion chant.

Unlike abortion, you are not deciding to do something to your own body. You are deciding to do something to other people’s bodies.

So, the more correct chant would be, “My body, your death!” or maybe “Your infection, my choice!”

It won’t make you any more popular with the rest of us, but at least you’d get points for honesty.

fcerabino@pbpost.com

@FranklyFlorida