Who are you going to believe, the Mayo Clinic or Lance Roberts, the GVEA engineer running for borough assembly against Kristan Kelly in Fairbanks?

Mayo Clinic: “Appropriate masking in addition to vaccination remain the best methods to help protect individuals from the Coronavirus,” says Gregory Poland, M.D., an infectious disease expert at Mayo Clinic.

Lance Roberts: “One of the last, spiteful things done by the senators who lost their seats last year, Coghill and Giessel, was to make a mask mandate for the Senate, even though the science is clear that masks not only don't help, but wearing them long-term can bring severe consequences.”

No one with any credibility says there are severe consequences for long-term wearing of masks.

“For many years, health care providers have worn masks for extended periods of time with no adverse health reactions. The CDC recommends wearing cloth masks while in public, and this option is very breathable. There is no risk of hypoxia, which is lower oxygen levels, in healthy adults. Carbon dioxide will freely diffuse through your mask as you breathe,” the Mayo Clinic says.

“If you feel uncomfortable in your mask, try to limit your talking and breathe through your nose. That will reduce the humidity level in your mask.”

At a candidate forum Friday, Roberts said he agreed with assembly candidate Patricia Silva, who falsely claimed masks cause long-term health problems and an imaginary disease.

It’s a God-given right to refuse to wear a mask, Roberts claims.

He says that wearing a mask is a medical intervention, which it is not. It’s more along the lines of “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”

Under his twisted logic, winter face masks—a necessity in Fairbanks if you spend time outdoors—are also verboten.

Roberts showed his mask madness in March, complaining that it was “ungodly” and “unconstitutional” to ask Sen. Lora Reinbold to show a little common sense by wearing a mask in the Legislature to protect others.

Roberts said that covering your face is covering the image of God and is not allowed.

“So how does that work with a law that itself violates the Constitution, spits in God's face by telling you to cover the Image Dei, and violates federal ADA and HIPAA laws/regs?” Roberts asked himself in his newsletter.

Cover the Image Dei?

(Perhaps he meant to write the Latin words “Imago Dei,” which is a theological term about how humans are in the image of God. In any event, this is not about wearing a mask to spit in God’s face, but preventing people from accidentally spitting tiny droplets in the faces of other people, clearly an act of charity.)

But not for Roberts, who feels the need to imagine that all those who disagree with him are his enemies and deserving of his wrath.

“In the end, they stood for government that has a boot on your neck, muzzling you, and sticking a needle in your arm with experimental drugs,” said Roberts, referring to the simple demand of wearing a mask as a “boot on your neck.”

Roberts is never shy about claiming to be on God’s side in politics.

A year ago he wrote an email to legislators with the subject line “Cutting Alaskans Throats” because he objected to a committee action on the budget.

“God will get the vengeance,” Roberts said on March 28, 2020.

“In the end, remember that God is in charge, and as I told the traitors in the legislature, God will have vengeance,” Roberts wrote in his newsletter, referring to Reps. Steve Thompson, Bart LeBon and Sens. Click Bishop and John Coghill, among others, as traitors.

He said “God will have vengeance” and that the legislators were cruel, malicious and evil because they backed a $1,000 dividend.

In 2013, Roberts claimed a Republican chairman of the state party was persecuting Christians, the Alaska Dispatch reported.

"While you may be drunk with power and feel that you can kill all the christians (sic) without repercussions, one day you will have to answer to God for your work against him and the principles of his that our platform is based on," Roberts said in an email that went to many party officials.

Roberts is free to make any claims he wants about God’s laws, but a comment made on my blog post-Saturday by former Sen. Joe Paskvan dismantles the legal claims by Roberts that a mask mandate is unconstitutional. Paskvan mentioned the actions by the Supreme Court more than a century ago approved vaccine mandates.

“Mask wearing is less restrictive than mandatory vaccinations,” said Paskvan. “Surgeons and medical professionals generally have been wearing masks for decades to protect themselves and others. The false and baseless statements of far-right extremists have no merit. The far-right extremists seek to impose unrestrained individualism and, therefore, to destroy all government and attempt to hide behind hollow cries of “liberty”. They are constitutionally wrong.”

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