Goodbye Personal Liberty: Falcons Fire Scout Because He Declined COVID Vaccine
There are three types of people in America:
-- Those who believe Atlanta Falcons area scout Rodrik David getting fired by the irrelevant, flailing NFL team on Thursday was great because every other employee within club owner Arthur Blank's empire is vaccinated, and David, who refused the so-called jab, should have bowed the proverbial knee and complied.
-- Those who don't care because, what the heck, Rodrick David could as easily be Larry David for all we know -- except probably not as funny or smugly liberal -- and so let's just live our own lives while other people sink or swim.
-- And those who see this as an affront to personal liberty and the right not to be discriminated against in the United States of America based on one's medical circumstances, choices or history.
If you're not in that last group, you've been brainwashed.
And your vision is off.
And, with all respect to those blind, brainwashed folks whose heartrate is climbing reading this, I'll explain your problem in a moment if you bear with me.
First, you should know David is pretty good at his job. This is his fifth season with the Falcons and his second as an area scout. He joined the club as a scouting intern during training camp, prior to the 2015 season, and was hired as a scouting assistant in February of 2016. He was promoted to pro scout prior to the 2017 season.
David was a riser.
But David is unemployed now because some billionaire decided he knows what's best for all his employees. And what's best, the owner decided, is to mandate all of them get vaccinated for COVID-19 -- ostensibly because we must keep everyone healthy, even if we must invade their privacy, intervene in their personal decisions, and even threaten their careers with ruin if we have to.
Blank obviously believes he's doing society some great favor because the vaccine makes everyone immune from COVID-19 and its multiple variants.
(Except it doesn't, just look at the troubling situation in Israel, which is one of the most vaccinated nations on earth.)
And, oh yeah, whoever doesn't like the owner's rules is out, regardless of how that wrecks anyone's life.
Because it's Blank's company, he gets to write his rules, and there are unwavering ruthless consequences for the individual not doing exactly what the corporate master says.
Bad look, Arthur Blank.
Terrible optics.
Now comes the part in this column where I try to reason with the angry people who are convinced I'm a lunatic for daring to defend personal freedom at any cost:
Let me begin with the idea that you're on a slippery slope as you watch David and other unvaxxed people get axed. Because you very well could be next.
It is not a leap to think that a private enterprise firing someone based on one medical decision can think it has the right to fire someone else based other medical decisions or circumstances.
You might get MRSA? We can fire you.
You're at risk of getting yellow fever? We can fire you.
Been anywhere around people with Ebola? Fired.
Like David, you don't have to actually have the disease we're afraid of. We just think you're not doing enough to prevent getting one of those whack diseases. So, you are fired.
All of these diseases are highly contagious and there are no known cures. So if you believe it's in the best interest of your workers to fire someone who didn't take the COVID vaccine based on the possibility one might infect others, it's no great leap to start chopping any employee who is at risk of contracting any contagious illness.
And where does it stop?
Today it's, "You must be vaxxed."
Tomorrow it could be, "You must get marked" -- if you get my drift.
Allow me to walk you through an exercise that will judge your intellectual fair mindedness:
Raise your hand if you think it would be fair to fire an employee because she had an abortion.
No one raises their hand because it's 2021 and we defend the right of people to make decisions about their own bodies, right? How is that decision about one's own body protected but not a decision about what to inject into one's own body?
Well, the argument might retort, abortion, unlike Coronavirus, isn't a great threat to society. Nobody gets hurt by an abortion like they might get hurt if people are refusing vaccines, the argument goes.
Tell that to the 60 million babies killed by abortion since the 1970s.
So, fair minded folks, if you defend a women's right to get abortion, you must defend a person's right to refuse a vaccine.
Hear that, Arthur Blank?
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion without repercussions from greater society.
It can, and eventually will be argued in American courts by someone with the huge cojones, that the "right to privacy" clause also protects a person's liberty to choose whether or not to get a vaccine without repercussions from greater society.
I know what you're thinking...
The slippery slope argument is fear mongering. It'll never happen.
I pray you're right. But I already know you're wrong.
In the last year, we went from "15 days to slow the spread" to "30 days to slow the spread," to months locked up at home.
We went from masks don't help, to masks help, to wear two masks at one point.
These people writing and shaping COVID narratives are the masters of the slippery slope.
And they're the masters of illogical rules.
We were told to stay six feet apart, as if the virus couldn't infect you at 5-foot-10.
We were told to wear a mask in restaurants but not when eating because, obviously, the virus understands to avoid folks wolfing down a hamburger.
Vaccines went from being the devil because they were created under the Donald Trump administration to being a saving grace under the Joe Biden administration. Same vaccines.
We were told the vaccines provide immunity and when that shifted to everyone understanding they don't provide immunity, the CDC actually changed the definition of immunity on its website.
We were told you'll never need a booster, then we were told here come the boosters, and now we're told you're not fully vaccinated unless you get all the boosters.
This is a never-ending cycle of people moving the goal posts because they simply do not possess absolute answers provided by unshakeable science.
But these are the people you are trusting as experts.
These are the people Arthur Blank is taking advice from as he implements uncompromising company policy that discriminates against an individual for making a personal vaccine decision.
Twitter: @armandosalguero