Consenting Adults

Vincent J. Curtis

1 Nov 20

RE: Sorry, Sam Oosterhoff, you're apology isn't good enough.  An Op-ed in the Spectator of 31 Oct 20 by Keith Leslie, who may have been somebody as some time, but I forgot.  Sam Oosterhoff is a political phenom in the Conservative Party, and is a social conservative.  He published a picture recently in of him with a group of forty other young people, none of whom were wearing masks.  

Apparently this pandemic has extinguished the idea, at least selectively extinguished the idea, of “consenting adults.”  Sam Oosterhoff, MPP for Niagara West, and parliamentary assistant to the minister of education, had his picture taken with forty other consenting adults, and no one wore a mask! (gasp!).

“Hypocrisy!” cried Keith Leslie.  “It was foolhardy!”  Oosterhoff’s apology isn’t good enough!  Restaurant and banquet business have suffered terribly during the pandemic.  He should be fired as PA to the MoE to prove that violating pandemic protocols has consequences!

Oosterhoof’s mistake was apologizing in the first place.  (Actually, his first mistake was publishing the picture, but never mind.)  No, it isn’t foolhardy for a young man of 23 to pose with other young people, because, at the height of this pandemic, there is a only one in fifty chance that one of those forty people is an active case of COVID-19.  And in his demographic, there are no COVID deaths in Ontario; and even if somehow he became infected, he would be asymptomatic.  Oosterhoff was at no measureable risk.

Sure, restaurants and banquet halls have suffered in the pandemic – because of government orders to close them up, then reopen under uneconomic conditions.  Out of fear of what the clients would do, not the restauranteurs. .

Young people are quaking in rebellion at the stupidity of masking and the other regulations.  It’s the realization that the Emperor has no clothes that strikes fear into the hearts of people like Leslie, and why he calls for humiliating Sam Oosterhoff.

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