ANTI-MASKERS: Watch your analogies

A Newsweek headline: Idaho Republicans push to strip health officials’ power: “We’re fearful of an elitist approach.”

Republican State Sen. Steven Thayan believes health experts setting public health policy (masking for COVID-19) is elitist and leads to totalitarianism.

Let me remind Senator Thayan that the Idaho Legislature did in fact act as a totalitarian body when it tried to overturn a public initiative that overwhelmingly passed and supported Medicaid expansion. What is more totalitarian than a group of “elected” officials undermining their own constituency?

On the matter of masking. The PHD meeting was an eye opener. I overheard the statement by an anti-masker that wearing a mask is like wearing the yellow Star of David stigmatizing Jews.

I’ll buy into that thinking when a masker is beaten or shot to death in front of their home, business or anywhere, for that matter. When a masker is rounded up, put in cattle cars and gassed with Zyklon B in a chamber. When a toddler is tossed into a pile after being thrown against a wall or shot/beaten to death for wearing a mask. When a masker’s body is incinerated for disposal.

There’s more, but anti-maskers using Jews to support their political agenda trivializes the Holocaust. Politics has no place in the health of our community.

DAVID M. COHEN

Coeur d’Alene