I hope you'll stay with me through a brief thought experiment.
Imagine for a moment that we live in a world very much like our own, with one exception: there are people who believe that firing bullets in random directions wards off the devil. As they walk around the grocery store, every now and then they pull out a revolver and fire a couple of rounds in random directions. They're not aiming at anyone in particular mind you... they aren't aiming at all... but nor do they care if anyone is standing in the path of their bullets. At the grocery store, they stop and fire bullets around them every now and then. At the post office, they stop and fire bullets every now and then. At the gas station, at the county court-house, at the hardware store.... more bullets, everywhere. And the bullets don't always kill the people they hit... very often they ricochet off of the targets they've found, and kill someone else, far away, days later.
When asked to stop this behavior, the shooters maintain "It's the only way to ward off the devil. And it's a personal choice! If you don't want to ward off the devil, that's fine, but as for me and mine... we'll keep shooting. Besides, bullets almost never kill people, the CDC is lying about how dangerous bullets are".
Imagine further that instead of quietly hauling the bodies out of sight to the morgue, the bodies of those unfortunate souls laid there for awhile in pools of blood... such that every time you went to the grocery store, or the post office, or the the hardware store, you had to step over them and walk around them, shielding your children's eyes from the carnage. The dead aren't invisible and easy to ignore in this scenario, there are daily visible, physical reminders of their stolen lives on the news, in social media, in our daily existence.
Please stop for just a moment and put yourself into that scenario. Would you still be so quick to argue "can't we all just get along?". Can you genuinely say you would be arguing that these people must be accepted in a pluralistic society? Would you still be arguing that we must accept them as our friends, employees, employers, and family members? Would you even be arguing that we must be civil to them??
Bluntly: If you're still arguing that these people deserve a place in our lives and should be treated as socially accepted equals, then you ought stop pretending to be offended by Nazis and the lives they destroy. If you can't find it in yourself to treat anti-maskers as pariahs, then please keep your whinging and outrage to yourself the next time some drunk driver accidentally kills people. If you are outraged and calling for jail and punishment for a drunk with a car that accidentally (but predictably) kills and maims bystanders, but not equally just fucking done with anti-maskers, then your outrage is merely political theater, and not a genuine expression of horror at the needless, reckless, wanton homicides of human beings.
