Along party lines, the North Carolina Senate passed a resolution banning the wearing of masks in public, even for health reasons.
Republican state Sen. Buck Newton, who sponsored the bill, said protesters were abusing pandemic norms by wearing masks to hide their identities.
Republican supporters say the mask ban would effectively reinstate a 1950s law targeting the KKK and would help police identify protesters. Police will be expected to use “common sense” and avoid using masks to arrest “grandmas”. At Walmart,” Newton told reporters.
newsweek The North Carolina State Senate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the 1950s, several states, including North Carolina, enacted anti-mask laws in response to hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, some of which have remained in law for decades. There is also. Louisiana and Minnesota have legal exceptions for religious face coverings. Other states, such as Florida and California, have made it a crime to wear a mask when committing or attempting to commit a crime.
However, there are exceptions, and in the era of COVID-19, the rule was expanded to include people who wear masks for health reasons.
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Newton's bill would remove that exception.
“This bill is clearly a response to the recent protests on college campuses against Israel's military operation in Gaza,” Melissa Price Krom, executive director of the grassroots group NC for the People Action, told NC Newsline. told. “So this is also an anti-protest bill.”
Mr Newton said the purpose of the law was to “address organizations and individuals who break the law and try to hide their identities”. He called the bill, H-237, “unmasking mobs and criminals.”
However, this bill would prohibit everyone from wearing masks, not just demonstrators. Newton pointed out that prior to the pandemic, there was no record of anyone being arrested for wearing a mask in North Carolina, even though it was technically illegal, WRAL reported.
Still, North Carolina Democrats denounced the bill as an example of Republican overreach.
Sen. Sidney Batch, a cancer survivor, said it's important to have people around you wear masks when your immune system is weakened during treatment.
“If you're a person walking around with tuberculosis and you want to wear a mask to protect others, you can't do that anymore under this bill,” Bach said.
Bach and his Democratic colleague Sen. Lisa Grafstein are pushing for an amendment to the bill that would give police the power to detain masked protesters while protecting people who wear masks due to health concerns. I was proposing it.
Other Democratic state senators, like Natasha Marcus, called the bill “a desire to score political points in an election year with anti-mask support at the expense of vulnerable populations.” He said there is.
All Senate Democrats voted against the bill, while all Republicans voted for it. The bill passed 30-15, and Gov. Roy Cooper (D) now has the power to veto it. But North Carolina Republicans have a supermajority in the Legislature and could use that to override the veto.
The bill was enacted on the heels of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country, where students and staff often covered their faces with surgical masks or other types of face masks.
Two of North Carolina's most elite schools, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have seen demonstrations where pro-Palestinian protesters removed American flags, and Duke University recently held demonstrations where dozens of 2024 graduates They boycotted Jerry Seinfeld's commencement speech. His support for Israel.
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