Stephen Teret, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, remembers giving presentations on the benefits of seat belts during those times. He heard a lot of pushback.
“People were really offended by the government telling them what to do,” Teret said in an interview.
Mandates regarding seat belts and face masks aren’t totally analogous, he said, in that asking people to wear masks is an effort to protect not just individuals but society at large. The argument against them is the same, though.
“We are a country that very, very much values personal freedoms,” Teret said. “And there are always some people who see their personal freedoms as being more important than the common good. And that’s the fight public health has always had.”
Health and safety rules typically have been upheld as constitutional based on the precedent established in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 Supreme Court decision. In a 7-to-2 vote, the court ruled against a Massachusetts minister who was fined $5 for refusing to comply with mandatory smallpox vaccination.
“In every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand,” the majority wrote.
Nevertheless, conservatives hammered Dole on the seat belt issue. Though there were some shrewd politics at play — the seat belt push was, in part, an attempt to placate auto manufacturers that opposed air bags — just the idea of telling citizens how they were supposed to drive was too much for the liberty crowd.
An editorial in the National Review, the conservative opinion magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr., said that “one of the purest examples of paternalism is the sort of laws enacted in more than a dozen states in the past year compelling the use of seat belts.”
