Jenna’s Side, a substack blog, posted an article on Monday about New York State’s financial attack on Amish schools.
The article reports:
In a display of audacious evil, the Empire State has fined three tiny Amish schools a combined $118,000 for allowing unvaccinated children to sit in single-room schoolhouses with other unvaccinated children. The schools—Dygert Road, Pleasant View, and Shady Lane—have accumulated $52,000, $46,000 and $20,000 in penalties, respectively. Under New York law, each breach carries a fine of up to $2,000, and the state considers each day an unvaccinated child attends school a separate violation. In this case, however, officials graciously calculated the first two schools’ penalties using just one day of violations per child. (If they were counting every day, ten pureblood kids showing up for a single school week could theoretically add another $100,000 to the tab.)
…The three schools in question aren’t sprawling state campuses where kids are being bussed in from fourteen zip codes. These are mostly one-room, Little House on the Prairie-style classrooms serving a dozen or two kids from the surrounding community. They sit on private land. They get no public funding. The families keep to themselves. They aren’t asking taxpayers to pay for their healthcare, their kick scooters, or their beard oil. All they’re asking is to be left alone.
Apparently, this is an impossible ask.
When the fines were first imposed, the Amish sued. They lost in federal district court. Then they lost at the Second Circuit. Then the Supreme Court vacated that judgment and told the appeals court to reconsider in light of its recent religious-liberty precedent. So the Second Circuit reviewed the case and basically said “Yeah, still no.”
One has to wonder what grave threat a self-sufficient, self-isolated, charmingly old-timey community presents to the region at large. I mean, if the rest of the state is all juiced up on the full glorious regime of immune-boosting jabs, how are the Amish a danger even if they hitch up their buggies, breach containment, and storm the closest Target?
The Amish are located in a number of states. They are small, peace-loving, old-fashioned communities that are a threat to no one (except maybe some of the control freaks in government positions). Their disease rates are considerably lower than those of the people outside their communities, and the Amish are a threat to no one. The State of New York needs to leave them alone.


