This appalling – and quite probably anti-Constitutional – announcement comes from Governor Kevin Stitt (R-OK) in response to the Covid-19 pandemic:
Governor Kevin Stitt announced today he is declaring Thursday, Dec. 3 as a statewide day of prayer and fasting for all Oklahomans affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Oklahomans have always turned to prayer to guide us through trials and seasons of uncertainty, and I am asking Oklahomans of all faiths and religious backgrounds to join together with me on Thursday,”said Gov. Stitt.“I believe we must continue to ask God to heal those who are sick, comfort those who are hurting and provide renewed strength and wisdom to all who are managing the effects of COVID-19.”
Gov. Stitt also encourages churches and other houses of worship to continue taking precautions to slow the spread of COVID-19 and to care for vulnerable members of their congregations.
“I believe our churches and faith communities have an incredible opportunity during this season to provide hope to Oklahomans who are struggling as we close a year that has been mentally, emotionally and physically draining,”said Gov. Stitt.“It’s important that we continue to find safe ways to gather as we all do our part to protect our families, neighbors and communities from this virus.”
It would be really, really interesting to see an animated geographic time-series of Oklahoma, tracing Covid-19 infection sites – a big contact trace, as it were – just to see if the religious gatherings called for by Governor Stitt become super-spreader events.
While magical thinkers can often argue their way out of binds, a graphic animation showing disease and death emanating from churches would certainly make some people think a little harder.
But one other thought came to mind as I typed this: toxoplasmosis:
The parasite du jour. I figured this was nicer than showing a cat killing a rodent.
Infection with T. gondii has been shown to alter the behavior of mice and rats in ways thought to increase the rodents’ chances of being preyed upon by cats. Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls. [Wikipedia, citations omitted]
The cases are rather parallel, wouldn’t you say? The worse the infection of fundamentalist religion, the more likely the infected are to become, err, infected with the virus causing Covid-19.
While it sounds self-correcting, it’s the secondary and tertiary victims of the latter infection, who may not be infected with the former, that also suffer. That’s why I can’t just shake it off. Too many innocent victims.
