“Hypocrisy” is often nothing more than failing to live up to our own standards. That is, sometimes we do things we know to be wrong or fail to do things we know we ought to do. That’s human.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is no mere hypocrite. She’s not simply some politician who didn’t follow the rules that apply to her constituents. She’s not just one more elite who believed herself above the law. We had plenty of those during the pandemic.
Bowser is doing something far worse than the other “tough-on-COVID” rule-breakers did.
She instituted a citywide indoor mask mandate on Thursday and made it effective on Saturday at 5 a.m. Then, on Friday night, she threw herself a celebrity-studded birthday party that was pretty much maskless, according to a photo tweeted out by Washington’s deputy mayor.
#DCisOpen and #DaveChappelle reopened @TheAnthemDC on Friday night! pic.twitter.com/MiDypxUSCC
— John J. Falcicchio (@falcicchio) July 31, 2021
On Saturday night, Bowser officiated a maskless outdoor wedding in Washington and then proceeded to the apparently maskless indoor reception, as reported by my colleague Tiana Lowe.
Her birthday party was not a surprise birthday party. The wedding wasn’t spontaneous. Bowser announced on Thursday the mask rule would be effective Saturday morning, knowing she was hosting a public Friday night party and a private Saturday night party.
That is, she declared that everyone had to wear masks for the district’s safety while already intending to host maskless crowded parties. She didn’t issue rules and then break them. She issued rules intending to break them.
So this leaves us with two possibilities: Either Bowser wants to spread COVID-19 through unmasked parties, or Bowser thinks vaccinated people can safely gather unmasked.
Charity requires us to assume it’s the latter — that she is mandating masks as a political act, and she doesn’t believe vaccinated people really need to mask for public health reasons. That makes her mandate an unjust and unwarranted infringement on others’ liberty. Her executive order was corrupt. And an unjust law, as tradition holds, is no law at all.
Importantly, this was an executive order. She’s not merely a politician disobeying a law. She single-handedly created the law she always intended to flout.
