Cameron’s attacks on Beshear over COVID ignore the real dangers we faced | Opinion
The latest campaign ad for Daniel Cameron is a vituperative attack on Gov. Andy Beshear’s closing churches as an attack on religious freedom. Cameron wants to treat the pandemic as a political issue when in reality it was a medical emergency. Beshear initially requested that churches close voluntarily on Nov. 19, 2020, when there were 14,342 cases of COVID in Kentucky. Some churches closed, but many insisted on staying open and the number of cases grew.
Beshear ordered churches to close on April, 12, 2021. U.S. District Judge David Hale ruled that he was within his rights to declare an emergency and act accordingly. A few weeks later, Federal Judge Gregory Tatenhove overturned his ruling and declared closing churches was unconstitutional. Incidentally, Cameron was once a law clerk for Tatenhove.
By the week of Jan. 13, 2022, the total cases in Kentucky had ballooned to 95,189. Thousands of these cases resulted from gullible people trusting the words of a clueless president who declared the virus a hoax and advised people to drink bleach and take horse dewormer. Currently, 18,595 Kentuckians have died from COVID.
Cameron ignores the inconvenient truth that the alternative to closing churches was to bury the churchgoers killed by COVID. Various studies have found that churches across the country were major spreaders of the covid virus. The American Medical Association has identified five reasons why churches are major concerns: enclosed spaces, large groups, close proximity to others, long duration of exposure, and loud talking and singing.
Consider the following examples:
▪ In March 2020, CNN reported that 106 of the 122 choir members of the Skagit Valley Chorale contracted covid after just one practice session.
▪ In Texas, 50 people were infected on July 10, 2020, when the pastor told the congregation to hug each other.
▪ At Greystone Baptist Church in Ronceverte, W.Va., seventeen people contracted covid within ten days of returning to church in late May. Fifty-one cases appeared including three deaths.
▪ The Lighthouse United Pentecostal Church in Union County, Oregon, reopened in May 2022. By July, there were 356 cases linked directly to attending that church.
Cameron’s ad would make one think the religion is or paramount importance to Kentuckians, but the data tell a different story, according to Pew. Only 39 percent of Kentuckians attend church every week and only 31 percent attend a few times per year. About a quarter of the population does not go to church.
Only 29 percent of Kentuckians attend some kind of religious group meetings other than Sunday morning services weekly.
About 53 percent of people reporting weekly attendance in churches are over 54 years old, the very demographic affected most by COVID.
But let’s look at one political aspect of the COVID pandemic. The death rate linked to COVID is about 38 percent higher in red states than in blue states. According to a report by the conservative Brookings Institute, forty percent of Republicans say they had no plans to get vaccinated.
Instead of addressing the truth about the very real risks of attending church, Cameron prefers to make incendiary comments about losing the rights to practice our religion. Closing churches is not without precedence. The federal government closed all churches nationwide during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 but churches reopened uneventfully after the pandemic subsided.
Before the masses attack me as a Godless liberal commie, I have been a faithful member of a local Presbyterian church for 37 years. We switched to zoom meetings for several months as a precaution to stem the tide of the pandemic. Did I miss the Sunday worship and fellowship services? Of course, but I had faith that advances in medical research would eventually return to a new normalcy where I could attend church as I wished.
Roger Guffey is a retired math teacher.