An Ohio lawmaker refused to have her temperature taken as she entered work at the Ohio State House on Tuesday.
“The reason I’ve had to put up with so much opposition over the last 4 years as a Representative is that NO ONE GETS TO CONTROL ME,” Republican state Rep. Candice Keller said on her Facebook page Wednesday. “I mean, NO ONE. I have civil rights and I have a right to privacy.”
In Ohio, temperature checking is required at child care facilities and recommended for employees in other settings, and the Ohio House of Representative’s policy requests that lawmakers do the same when attending a session where fellow legislators are voting, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“He followed me to the elevator!” Keller continued in the Faceook post. “He got closer and stood there like he was going to force me. He kept holding the thermometer up in front of me. I turned around and pointed my finger at him and I said, ‘You’re not taking my temperature!’”
Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican, said in a statement that lawmakers and visitors are required to have their temperature taken to ensure they don’t have a fever and, therefore, a possible coronavirus infection based on a policy enacted on May 4.
“It is required for staff and visitors to have their temperatures taken, and it is offered for members,” Householder said. “I cannot mandate elected representatives have their temperatures taken as much as I cannot keep them from coming to the Statehouse to represent the people who elected them.”
“For me, I find this practice highly personal and offensive. The second you try to violate my privacy, I will call you out on it. I don’t care who you are,” Keller added in her post, calling for Americans to “stand up.”
She continued: “Tenacity and rugged individualism is about as American as it gets. I’m not a bully but I seem to have been surrounded by them since I ran for public office in 2016. Too bad. I ignore bullies and I always have. I don’t back down. You shouldn’t either. Ridiculous.”
Localities across the country are weighing whether or not to make temperature checks mandatory as part of the process of reopening the economy, and some places have already said that’s what they will do.
Officials in Sonoma County, California, are set to require that employees returning to work download a smartphone app that takes their temperature to ensure they don’t have coronavirus symptoms, while Colorado schools are considering mandatory temperature checks when schools open this fall.
