So Speaker Vos and Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald want Gov. Evers to allow an exception to the Safer at Home order for Easter Sunday services. (They’ve also included Passover in their request, but they’re either too ignorant or too dishonest to concede that Passover is commemorated traditionally in a home setting. It’s obviously a certain Christian voter they aim to beguile.)
One can put aside for a moment the suspicion that Vos & Fitzgerald simply want to portray Tony Evers – probably the most moderate Democratic governor in America – as somehow hostile to religion.
Instead, even when taking Vos & Fitzgerald as defenders of Christian liberty, one finds that their grasp is weak. The state’s largest Christian religious institution, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, for example, has already decided against in-church mass on Easter. Leading protestant denominations have said the same (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4.)
There is a clear scriptural injunction against testing God’s providence when it need not be tested (Deut. 6:16, Mt. 4:7). If Vos & Fitzgerald read more, perhaps they would speak less on this subject.
And yet, and yet — they have read (or understood) less of the religious tradition they claim to defend than Wisconsin’s prominent religious institutions.
As for a political constituency they aim to incite, well, in that selfish effort they’re more practiced. (Vos’s third wife, conservative pundit Michelle Litjens Vos, thinks the response to this pandemic is an “overreaction.” She’s offered her untrained medical opinions on Facebook, for those gullible enough to take her advice over that of America’s finest epidemiologists.)
Robin Vos & Scott Fitzgerald are, in this and so much else, scheming political men.
Nothing more.