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Notes -
What was the law that made this a temporary exception? Your link only shows the removal.
Anyway, you missed a couple options.
Now, I agree with your prediction. At least the strict form, where you mean people committing crimes other than mask-wearing. I do not expect the law to be used against sympathetic chemo patients. I think it would quite likely be applied to the mythical peaceful (but still masked) protest. As in—near 100% that, if a protest were shut down with arrests, some of the perps would only be charged under this statute. It’s just too easy to insist that they were aiming for intimidation and thus must have been concealing identity. Ask @gattsuru if it’s a good idea, generally speaking, to rely on police discretion.
Of course, I don’t really expect such arrests, because I expect the law to have its intended chilling effect.
Again, I’m not asking you to agree with objectors. You probably have a very different level of trust in the police, and you certainly have a different evaluation of health risks. I’m simply imagining the alternate universe where this has the complete opposite valence. Where it’s seen as legal chicanery comparable to NY handgun law, or a state power grab along the lines of wiretapping. Where the same users who cry foul about liberal bias ask why this time, the ambiguity is okay.
Thanks for the corrective, I sincerely appreciate the effort and want to improve my mental model of what people are thinking. The biggest change I would make in my framing is updating the fourth item to be significantly more charitable.
As a bit of pushback though, if the explanations you're offering are the positions held, I don't see what the reason would be for making the argument about the health provisions. If it's an important right for people to be able to conceal their identities, why not focus on that instead of whether there should be narrow exemptions? If the problem is vagueness, that should be addressed directly.
For the record, I am not particularly trusting of police, either individually or institutionally. My position on this doesn't really on police being the rigorously honest thin blue line, it only goes as far as noticing that I can't think of any parallels for something like claimed negative impacts of repealing this exemption. Again, if the concern is that people should be able to conceal their identities and not allowing them to do so is an abuse of state power, I can easily get into the mindspace of sharing concerns and trying to figure out what to do. I just flatly don't buy that the change to statute is criminalizing anything that actually has anything at all to do with health.
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Here. Compare with here for what the law looked like before.
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