Vermonters have not been advised whether their families will be allowed to gather for Christmas.  Vermont governor Phil Scott's Thanksgiving prohibition of family gatherings raised eyebrows nationally.  Post-holiday, schoolchildren were quizzed by teachers and sent home if they reported visitors in their homes.  Will Christmas be similarly policed?

Meanwhile, the Vermont Department of Health officially left citizens free to "have sex with others outside your household," advising, "Take precautions ... with people at risk for severe COVID-19 illness such as people over 65 years of age or those with serious medical conditions."  Few contrasts could more openly demonstrate how arbitrary Vermont's COVID rules have become than prohibiting family meal gatherings while advising strangers they can have sex freely.

Even though children are at extremely low risk from COVID, Vermont schoolteachers gathered children post-holiday to draw pictures of Thanksgiving dinner and inquire about attendance.  Not surprisingly, this sparked huge resentment in a state that has tiptoed around the issue of out-of-state tourists and real estate–buyers flooding Vermont's roads and businesses with zero enforcement. 

Governor Scott proclaimed: 

From my standpoint, this is fair warning to those of you who are planning to have gatherings from outside your household for Thanksgiving… If you don't want your kids to have to transition to remote learning and quarantine for a seven-day period, maybe you ought to make other plans.

Vermont churches have been criticized for holding services, but sexual promiscuity is specifically condoned.  In contrast, families have been asked to sacrifice "for the children":

"This is an example of why it's so important to be vigilant, and avoid small gatherings. And it's my hope that adults will realize the need to sacrifice, in order to give our kids this important time in their life and, most importantly, keep them in school," Scott said.

If keeping kids in school were "most important," they wouldn't be sent home for two weeks for partaking of tryptophan with their grandparents while sexual degeneracy is promoted by the Vermont Health Department.  A September 2020 "Fact Sheet" entitled "Enjoy Safer Sex and Reduce the Risk of Spreading COVID-19" counsels:

During this extended public health emergency, people will and should have sex. Consider using harm reduction strategies. We know that other viruses like the one that causes COVID-19 do not easily spread through sex. This means sex is not likely a common way that COVID-19 spreads. If you do have sex with others outside of your household, have as few partners as possible and pick partners you trust[.]

Perhaps they are teaching that in the schools...

History instructs that child informants divide families and societies, which is precisely what Vermont's bizarre post-Thanksgiving reporting edicts have done.  Divided loyalties create great stress for the children themselves.  Faced with conflicting claims by teachers versus parents, children are being emotionally manipulated by this governor.  As one Vermont school superintendent summarized: "It really is not incumbent upon a superintendent to make Solomon-like decisions for families[.]"

Governor Scott has imposed Solomonic decision-making on others, while threatening ominously that if the virus continues to spread, he "has a lot of tools in the toolbox."  In view of the arbitrary inequities of his plethora of Grinchy edicts, one can only imagine what hideous (and unconstitutional) machinations he has in mind for Christmas now that the virus continues to spread after he ixnayed Thanksgiving.

If Christmas is COVID-canceled in Vermont, parents may be tempted by this bizarre legal imbalance to merely instruct their back-to-school children to inform teachers that everyone at the house was just having sex, and then they will not be sent home or placed in emotionally harmful conflict.  Though legal, this is to be discouraged, as Vermont's students are already confused enough.

And so are the rest of us. 

Enough already.

Image: Produnis.