On October 4, three scientists published “The Great Barrington Declaration,” a statement named for the Massachusetts town in which they met.

Infectious disease epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School call for a “focused protection” approach to overcoming COVID-19.  Versus the “lockdown/shutdown” efforts we’ve suffered through for the last seven months, they support letting the young and healthy get substantially back to normal life and start building herd immunity, while attempting to shield the most vulnerable among us: The elderly and those with particularly dangerous potential co-morbidities.

The Declaration now boasts more than half a million co-signers, ranging from eminent figures in the scientific, medical, and political communities, to interested regular citizens, and of course to the inevitable trolls (i.e. “Dr. Johnny Fartpants”).

Of course, popularity isn’t the same thing thing as scientific validity. The Declaration was instantly met with smug dismissal from the government and academic “experts” who recommended, and continue to recommend, the lockdown/shutdown approach.

I’m not a scientist. I don’t play a scientist on TV. I’m not going to try to fool you into thinking I’m an expert on the science surrounding COVID-19.

Nonetheless, I support the Great Barrington Declaration — not because of the specific approach it advocates, although I agree with that approach, but because it demonstrates two important truths about science that many seem to have lost sight of recently.

First, there is no such thing as “THE science.” Different scientists are reaching different conclusions about how COVID-19 spreads, how it might be prevented from spreading, who’s most at risk from it, etc.

All of those conclusions are necessarily tentative and provisional, and can change as new information becomes available. That’s how science works. More than a century after he first published it, physicists are still conducting experiments to test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. COVID-19 has been on the radar for less than a year.

Claims of a “scientific consensus” on the pandemic are worse than false: They’re irrelevant. The truth is whatever it is, much of that truth remains to be discovered, and the percentage of scientists agreeing doesn’t tell us right from wrong. “This well-known scientist says it, I believe it, that settles it” isn’t respecting science, it’s practicing religion. Especially if the “scientist” in question is really just a bureaucrat in a lab coat.

Second, science can’t determine what we value or how much. Life involves trade-offs. How many millions have the “lockdown” mandates plunged into poverty? How many depressed individuals have finally given in to suicidal urges heightened by fear and confinement? How many businesses have shut their doors? We could end the pandemic in short order if we all starved ourselves to death. Would it be worth the cost? Science can’t tell us. Deciding what’s important to us isn’t its province.

Science holds, and deserves, an honored place in society. Turning it into a state religion damages both it and us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“I do want to be clear,” Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said during her Senate confirmation hearing, “that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.”

A laudable stand, one might think. But some don’t. Self-designated representatives of the LGBTQ community immediately escorted Barrett to the pillory.  “I did not choose to be gay,” thundered USA Today columnist Steven Petrow. “Ditto for the millions of LGBTQ people in this country who find ‘sexual preference’ highly charged and who were shocked by Barrett’s use of the term.”

Barrett quickly apologized: “I certainly didn’t mean and would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense to the LGBTQ community.”

As a member of that community, I wish she hadn’t apologized.

Not just because “preference” is logically a subsidiary trait to “orientation,” although that’s true. If we are, as many believe, biologically hard-wired to prefer romantic and sexual relationships of certain types, well, OF COURSE we prefer such relationships to others.

Nor only because some LGBTQ persons believe that their romantic/sexual preferences are shaped by environment as well as by heredity (I’m agnostic on the subject), although that’s true as well.

Barrett should not have apologized because the position implied by her use of the word “preference” is the only position compatible with the rights and freedoms most of us would want her to defend and preserve from a bench on the Supreme Court.

Attempts to erase the idea of “preference” from discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity are attempts to deny and suppress the free will, choice, and agency of the very people who constitute “the LGBTQ community.”

Neither I nor my many friends in that community deserve to be treated as helpless slaves to a biological equivalent of the old religious doctrine of predestination — “the elect” to our supporters, “the defective” to those who loathe us, powerless pawns whose thoughts and actions affect nothing.

What would the point of “LGBTQ Pride” be to a herd of mindless robots marching blindly down the Pride Day parade route in accordance with programs we own no authorship of? What rights could such machines claim to possess? Without free will, what actions of theirs could be judged?

The New Puritans of progressivism want us to think of ourselves as such robots. That would make us easier to order around for political gain. Real people with rights, reasons, and preferences — people who choose our own relationships and craft our own personalities, of whatever type and on whatever grounds we deem important — frighten, enrage, and confuse them. I hope Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t see us the way they do.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“The Supreme Court,” said Tucker Carlson on the October 12 edition of his Fox talk show, “exists only to determine whether the laws that our politicians write are consistent with the Constitution of the United States. That’s why we have a Supreme Court. It’s the only reason we have it.”

Perhaps Tucker should keep a copy of the Constitution, maybe even a history book or two, on his desk (or on the table in his show’s writers’ room) to help him avoid saying stupid things like that in public.

“Judicial review” of laws for the purpose of determining their constitutionality or unconstitutionality is far from the “only” reason for the Court’s existence. In fact, the practice isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution itself, and wasn’t firmly established until 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall asserted (in Marbury v. Madison) that “a law repugnant to the Constitution is void, and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.”

Per Article III of the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s power extends to “all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority,” as well as to cases involving ambassadors and diplomats, maritime cases, cases to which the US is a party, suits between states, suits between citizens of different states,  suits involving foreign states, etc.

The Court has a pretty big bailiwick, covering various kinds of litigation that turns on applications of statute or treaty, as well as appeals of supposed judicial error in lower courts, rather than on questions of constitutionality per se.

But where constitutionality IS concerned, it’s far from obvious that the Court has a very good record vis a vis “judicial review.”

Between 1857 and 1954, for example, the Court went from black people having “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Dred Scott v. Sandford) to “separate but equal” (Plessy v. Ferguson) to “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education). While the 14th Amendment did come into play between the first two of those three cases, it’s pretty clear that each turned more on the popular sentiments of the times than on the text or meaning of the Constitution.

Trusting the Supreme Court to defend our rights via “judicial review” is a fool’s game. We need look no further for evidence of that than the grandstanding and political wheedling that accompanies every vacancy on the Court. Republicans and Democrats both demand justices who will find a way, some way, any way, to shoehorn their policy goals INTO the Constitution, not justices who will apply the law without passion or prejudice.

The Cult of the Court is a shiny thing, but in the end the Court is just a court, and its members are just politicians in black dresses. The best we can hope for from them is that they’ll give due attention to their real jobs and resist the political temptations of “judicial review.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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