Texas salon owner Shelley Luther, who was jailed for opening her business and has been called a “modern-day Rosa Parks,” has now been freed thanks to action by the Texas Supreme Court and the state’s governor, Greg Abbott. Yet while the imperious judge who’d sentenced her has been scorned in conservative circles, forgotten is that Luther’s troubles only began because of a lockdown order Abbott issued — in defiance of science and reason.
For a little background, Texas has joined most other states in instituting a governor-ordered “lockdown” to combat the Wuhan Flu. “But Luther, frustrated that her store, Salon à la Mode, had been closed since March 24 and worried about the economic prospects of herself and her employees, reopened her salon on April 24, and refused to acknowledge a cease-and-desist letter from Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins to close her salon,” reported The New American yesterday.
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“During an April 25 protest in Frisco, Texas, Luther publicly tore up the letter in an act of civil disobedience, Boston 25 reported. Her decision to reopen has received significant support from residents in the area, CBS DFW reports, including the Open Texas Movement,” TNA continued.
Luther appeared before Dallas judge Eric Moye on Tuesday and refused to recant when he offered her leniency if she would apologize for being “selfish.” She’d acted out of desperation, she explained, and then said, powerfully, that “feeding my kids is not selfish.”
In fact, Judge Moye may be the selfish one. After all, while he creates no wealth yet still collects his handsome paycheck during the lockdown, he appears insensitive to the difficulties of a less powerful person forbidden from earning her living. As Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said last night, while Moye did have to enforce the law, he could have just issued a $50 fine. Instead, he threw the book at Luther, handing down a week’s jail time and fining her $3,500 plus $500 for every day her business is open until May 8, the date when Texas salons may resume operations.
The good news for Luther is that the Texas Supreme Court ordered Thursday that she be released from jail while it considered her petition for emergency relief. This was followed today by Governor Abbott’s modification of his executive order to “ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order,” reports the BBC, with the change “retroactive to April 2nd.” In other words, Luther is a free woman.
Moreover, Lieutenant Governor Patrick quite charitably has covered her fine (and had volunteered to suffer punishment in her stead), and more than $500,000 has been raised for her via crowd-funding. So Luther is also a woman made whole. Yet it won’t be so easy making our country whole after the economy-rending lockdown debacle, perhaps one of American history’s greatest blunders.
A more minor (but still lamentable) blunder was putting on the bench the aforementioned Judge Moye, a left-wing radical who once called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas a “race traitor.” Yet Moye has at least taken it on the chin, as the Wednesday Tucker Carlson Tonight segment below evidences.
Do note, however, that the loathsome judge was enforcing the judgments of Governor Abbott, who, though likely well-intended, might have helped pave a road to Hell with those good intentions.
That is to say, first there was a study indicating that lockdowns save no lives; now research finds that (as an example) South Africa’s lockdown will cause 29 times more deaths than the Wuhan virus would have. After all, economic distress and poverty are associated with a host of negative health and health-related risks, such as a higher incidence of manifold diseases, depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, domestic violence, child abuse, and crime.
Realize here that we’ve had flu pandemics (notably in 1918-19, 1957, and ’68) that adjusted for population caused more deaths than the Wuhan virus likely will. Yet we didn’t shut down life and cause long-term death.
Instead, we relied on the natural vaccination known as “herd immunity,” which is how Sweden is, apparently successfully, handling the Wuhan Flu. It’s what many experts have warned we should have been doing all along, too.
How does it work? Note that the vast majority — perhaps upwards of 80 percent — of those contracting the virus will have mild to no symptoms. So the idea is that you allow people to behave much as they normally do, while protecting and isolating vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly), until enough people develop immunity via exposure so that the disease can no longer spread.
At this point, the vulnerable can again resume normal life because the virus will have been “exterminated,” as epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski put it, a process that he said would normally take only a few weeks.
Instead, we’ve just prolonged the inevitable and invited the avoidable. Consider: Governor Abbott was “caught” admitting that opening Texas would cause a spike in Wuhan Flu cases.
Well, of course it would!
But this is irrelevant. As Dr. Wittkowski pointed out, “flattening the curve” (ugh, how many times must we hear this phrase?) also widens it; in other words, you don’t necessarily have fewer virus deaths.
You just have them over a longer period of time.
Meanwhile, we’re also wrecking the economy, which leads to more death from other causes.
This can be analogized to getting into a frigid swimming pool: Jumping in suddenly involves some moments of intense discomfort. Walk in slowly driven by fear and you must endure a long, drawn out, torturous period.
Of course, where the analogy fails is that taking the coward’s route into the water doesn’t mean taking a bath of Venezuelan proportions.
Unfortunately, our leaders dare not even contemplate the above because, as Carlson points out, it indicts their judgment. How many people can honestly consider that they may be responsible for possibly destroying their nation?
Well, the sociopathic might be able to, but that 50 percent of the political class is beyond this article’s scope.
Image of Shelley Luther: Screenshot of YouTube video by Dallas Morning News
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
