NEW YORK — Civil liberties groups and disability advocates are against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s new plan to ban masks on the New York train. This is bringing up a long-running debate about the right to protest anonymously that has become more complicated since the pandemic.
Hochul, a Democrat, backed the idea this week after a string of fights between masked pro-Palestinian campaigners and Israelis that the governor and others called antisemitic. She said that the bill, which hasn’t been written yet, would have “common-sense exemptions” for people who have to cover their faces for religious or medical reasons.
If the ban is put into place, New York will join a growing number of states that have laws against public masks. These laws are meant to crack down on activists who hide their faces at protests.
But Jay Stanley, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the new limits raise constitutional questions because they seem to be meant to stop a certain group from doing something that most people do.
He also said that “COVID completely smudged the contours of the debate over arcane mask laws” because mask-wearing is such a broad activity that so many people do for so many reasons. This creates a real risk of selective prosecution against disfavored groups.
New York used to have a law that said groups of three or more couldn’t wear masks in public. The law went back to the 1800s when tenant farmers in upstate New York dressed as Native Americans and violently fought their owners. When COVID-19 hit, the rule was done away with.
People who took public transportation had to wear masks until two years ago.
Many people who still wear masks on the train to protect themselves from the virus are also upset about the effort to bring back the ban. This has led disability advocates to launch a campaign to put pressure on Hochul’s office to reject the idea.
Jason Roth, who lives in Brooklyn and has an allergic disease, said that the bill would “further stigmatize people who continue to mask,” even if it had exceptions.
“We don’t feel welcome on the bus already,” he said. “Why should I have to prove to other people that I have to wear a mask for health reasons?”
As protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have grown, younger activists are hiding their faces more and more for reasons that have nothing to do with the virus. They say they are afraid of being harassed or punished by universities, employers, and other groups, and police are using facial recognition technology more and more.
But experts say the strategy gives bad guys more confidence. This week, a video showed a group of protesters, some of whom were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves over their faces. They asked if anyone on a busy subway car was a Zionist and told them, “This is your chance to get out.”
Hochul told CNN on Thursday that the “unacceptable” event made her think about putting masks back on the banned list.
“If someone puts on this mask and comes into a subway car, you don’t know if they’re going to be committing a crime and have a gun, or if they’re just going to threaten or scare you because you’re Jewish, which is exactly what happened the other day,” she said.
Still, it’s not clear if certain people in the car were picked on because of their religious or political beliefs.
Long before the outbreak, the law against mask-wearing was accused of selective enforcement, which led to a number of lawsuits that said the law violated the right to free speech.
In 1999, the Ku Klux Klan sued the city so they could hold a meeting in Manhattan while wearing their traditional hoods and robes. This was one of the most well-known struggles. A federal judge ruled in favor of the Klan, but an appeals court overturned the decision, saying that the state had the right to “regulate conduct that it legitimately considers potentially dangerous.”
Not long ago, people who supported the Russian feminist band Pussy Riot tried to change the law after they were arrested in New York for marching while wearing balaclavas. In the end, the city dropped the charges against the protesters, which meant the case was no longer valid.
Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer who worked with both the Ku Klux Klan and the Pussy Riot, said that Hochul’s efforts to ban masks on public transit could give people another way to fight the law.
Siegel said, “I get what they’re trying to do, but we have a long history of peaceful protest and free speech.” “This is a very important case for the First Amendment.”
Source: AP News
