Skip to main content

The Lockean Project

Moral coherence needed

“Moral coherence needed”, Monterey Herald – Oct. 24, 2021

Governor Newsom’s mandate that all school children must be vaccinated against COVID took choice away from school children and parents. Does the governor have a deep protective instinct?  No. Let’s look at the whole picture.  When courts recently ordered that California prison guards be vaccinated, Governor Newsom appealed the decision, claiming that the guards should not be required to be vaccinated. Virtually all prisoners are vaccinated but only 42% of guards are.

Why the discrepancy? He denies choice to school children but wants free choice for prison guards. It’s California politics as usual!   The state’s prison guard union — a group that donated $1.75 million to Newsom in September’s recall election — had argued against the vaccine mandate. Now the Newsom administration is appealing to the Ninth Circuit to block the mandate. The prison guard union has exerted a heavy hand on the California government for years, keeping more inmates behind bars than required. Now it has extracted another political favor.

It’s bad enough to mandate vaccines for young people at minimal risk from COVID, but could the governor at least demonstrate some moral coherence?

— Thomas F. Lee, Monterey