Apparently all you have to do to have your COVID-19 superspreader event approved by Trump’s National Park Service is play the religion card.
As reported by the Independent:
The National Park Service has approved a permit for an evangelical “worship protest” gathering this weekend on the National Mall in Washington DC, which is expected to attract 15,000 attendees amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Sean Feucht, a singer and former Republican congressional candidate, will host the event as part of his “Let Us Worship” tour. He’s held the tour in cities across America amid the coronavirus pandemic to protest Covid-19 restrictions against religious gatherings.
Current guidelines in the nation’s capital prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people. But the National Mall is under the jurisdiction of the Park Service, which has been without a director for the entirety of Trump’s term. Instead, a series of quasi-directors hand-picked by interior secretary and fossil-fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt have controlled the agency. As a result, as pointed out in this article written by Mark Kaufman for Mashable, “The president's office can manipulate or bend it to its whims.”
And those whims apparently extend to subjecting Washington, D.C. residents to COVID-19 infection—as long as its done in the name of Jesus. According to the Daily Beast, the Park Service issued the permit for the Oct. 25 “protest” with no COVID-19 restrictions required. A spokesman for the Park Service confirmed to the Daily Beast: “While the National Park Service strongly encourages social distancing, the use of masks, and other measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, we will not require nor enforce their use.”
Public health experts are appalled.
“It’s disgraceful,” Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who advises the World Health Organisation, told The Daily Beast. “It violates DC’s Covid-19 plan and it’s almost certainly going to lead to a superspreader event — and cause many new cases, hospitalisation, and even death. It violates virtually every principle to mitigate this pandemic.”
As noted by the Independent , the instigator of this “worship” protest is Sean Feucht, a failed Republican candidate for Congress, singer/musician, and “worship pastor” at the Bethel Church in Redding, California. Feucht was denied a permit for a similar event by the city of Seattle last month. He also provoked the wrath of local health officials in Nashville after holding one of these public gatherings in violation of that city’s COVID-19 restrictions.
Feucht’s attitude towards social distancing measures amounts to mockery. After his permit to infect Seattle was denied, he penned a screed for the right-wing Federalist, which decried the infringement on his “God-given freedoms.”
Now in major cities across America, godless politicians are adopting tactics that more closely resemble those of jihadist ayatollahs than men and women who are sworn to uphold the rule of law.
[...]
Truly, the actions of militant, anti-Christian forces, who want to shut down our churches, silence our worship, and even shoot our fellow believers in the streets, have stirred the soul of the American church.
Feucht is careful to call his superspreader events “protests.” After the Nashville gathering he posted a video on Instagram, stressing: "It's officially a protest, OK? So it's legal."
During the run-up to Donald Trump’s impeachment, Feucht and about 50 other “worship leaders” met with Trump in the Oval Office for a “faith briefing.” At that time, Feucht posed for a picture in which he conspicuously posed touching Trump’s sleeve in the same manner Jesus is described as being touched in the Gospel of Luke. Vice President Mike Pence recently appeared at one of Feucht’s “protests,” and Feucht has also appeared on Fox News.
The event is taking place this Saturday and includes a tent where attendees can be “baptized” by a group of “pastors,” after which the participants will doubtlessly return to wherever they came from, putting everyone they encounter at risk along the way. The Daily Beast interviewed one Washington, D.C. resident, who called the event “fucking stupid” and an “attention-grab” for Feucht.
“This is insane,” D.C. resident Allison Lane told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “This is truly selfish behavior from people who claim to be devoted to the word of God. I don’t get it. The National Park Service is being willfully ignorant.”
No one should be fooled into believing that Feucht’s dangerous agenda is about God. It’s about Feucht.