The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines to ban everyone from wearing face masks in public.
The Republican-dominated senate said protesters were abusing pandemic norms to wear masks so that they could conceal their identities.
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House Bill 237 passed 30-15, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat opposed.
InfoWars reports: Republicans argue the law will help police identify agitators who are abusing the Covid-era mask rules to commit violence during protests.
“Police will be expected to use ‘common sense’ not to use it to arrest ‘Granny in the Walmart,’” bill sponsor Sen. Buck Newton stated, according to Newsweek.
Newton said the bill is intended to “deal with organizations and individuals who are intent on breaking the law and hiding their identity.”
However, Democrats claim the rule would prohibit people from wearing masks for medical reasons, including barring cancer patients from using them, which Republicans argue is a gross mischaracterization of the law.
“Is it really that you find masked chemo patients that threatening? Something about them makes you really angry?” Sen. Natasha Marcus (D-Mecklenburg) asked this week. “Or is this, more likely, a desire to score some political points with the anti-mask crowd during an election year, at the expense of vulnerable people?”
One cancer-surviving Democrat senator, Sen. Sydney Batch (D-Wake) asserted it was her “freedom” to wear a mask, saying, “This bill criminalizes their behavior, and mine… We talk a lot about freedoms in this chamber. I hear it all the time. I should have the freedom — my children and my husband should have the freedom — to wear masks in order to protect and save my life, without fear of being arrested and charged.”
“Someone walking around with tuberculosis, wants to wear a mask to protect everybody else is no longer able to do that based on this bill,” she added.
Newton contends “there is no record of anyone being arrested in North Carolina prior to the pandemic for wearing a mask, even though it was technically illegal,” Newsweek reports.
The bill will next head to Democrat North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk, who could veto the legislation; however, Republicans have a legislative supermajority which they can use to override the veto.
