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Freedom-loving smoothie-shop owner has lawsuit over mask use thrown out because being philosophically opposed to masks is not the basis of a sound lawsuit

If you're going to sue over state mask rules you need to prove you've been harmed by them first, but Noreen Bechade, owner of an Herbalife-based smoothie shop in Plymouth, failed completely to do that, a federal judge has ruled in tossing her suit against Gov. Baker.

In a decision published last month (Ed. note: Yes, the UHub Coronavirus Legal Desk somehow completely missed this.), US District Court Judge Richard Stearns ruled that Bechade provided no proof that any jack-booted state agents forced her against her will to put on a mask, let alone stormed her shop to make her employees take this one step to protect customers.

She thus has not established that she suffered any concrete and particularized injury with respect to the mask requirement. ... Bechade suggests that the mask requirement personally impacts her because the executive orders “threaten fines if she were to live her life as she wants." ... [H]owever, the Complaint does not allege any instance in which Bechade was forced to wear a mask or was otherwise unable "to live her life as she wants."

Stearns continued that Bechade is no unique snowflake - that the masking rules apply to all Massachusetts residents and that she didn't show how her brave words about how coroonavirus isn't anything a "healthy" person such as herself should worry about make her different:

To the extent Bechade instead means to suggest that her injury is the general threat of fine that she faces for noncompliance with the mask requirement, the Court finds this harm insufficient to establish standing. Every resident of Massachusetts faces this same general threat of enforcement, and Bechade fails to plead any individual desire or intention to violate the mask requirement which might distinguish her from other residents. See Katz, 672 F.3d at 71. She thus has not shown that such a threat is concrete and particularized to her or actual or imminent.

In a footnote, Stearns writes things might be different had Bechade been able to provide examples:

The court does not express any opinion as to whether an allegation that Bechade was personally forced to wear a mask or to require her employees to wear a mask would suffice to establish an injury in fact for standing purposes. It merely concludes that, under these circumstances, Bechade has not shown that she suffered a concrete and particularized injury absent such an allegation.

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Comments

The first US Supreme Court decision upholding stay at home orders, travel restrictions and quarantines was in 1824.

Legal work upholding mask mandates? Goes back 100+ years.

Pretty much the only laws that get struck down are the ones that interfere with interstate trade.

Funny how people who bray about "mah constitutional rights" have no grasp of the fact that the courts have been there, done that, and have 200 years of case law supporting public health mandates in times of epidemics and pandemics.

As for “threaten fines if she were to live her life as she wants" , well, LOL. Has this twit ever gotten a speeding ticket?

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But with the new Supreme Court justice, I don't look forward to rulings which are based on the way the county was run before before the industrial revolution.

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.

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Taking advantage of the pandemic and our 'need' to stay healthy & boost our immunity; there are Herbalife 'smoothie' shops opening on the South Shore. They are making sexy sounding fruit drinks - some of which sound good - to help with what ails you. Of course these magical elixirs contain Herbalife products.

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many years ago, back when Roxette had a hit record, my sister and I were put on herbal life as a diet.

We were told to mix this lovely chocolate or vanilla powder in blender with some fruit to make smoothies.

Have two of these a day, a sensible dinner and not to exceed 2000 calories per day

My sister wanted nothing to do with the shakes, and had McDonald's as her one lone meal a day.

In some ways she was smarter because these shakes tasted like chalk.

And of course it didn't work, I gained weight, and my sister amazingly lost weight during the two months we were on it (before my mom got tired of paying..)

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Sounds great, doesn't it?

Except the immune system is very complex and these are the last people that I would expect to even understand what they mean by that.

Also interesting: attempts to develop a vaccine for SARS derailed when it appeared to accelerate the mayhem. Why? Because it BOOSTED IMMUNITY.

When you have a disease that kills people with their own immune systems, one should be careful about what component of immunity is being boosted, and how, right?

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a brand of shampoo?

If not, I am in favor of starting a rumor that it is. South Shore Shampoo Smoothies! When you really need a cleanse!

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snake oil / pyramid scheme / shitty milkshake company? Da noive!"

Liberty doesn't mean the freedom to infect other people, you selfish ignoramus.

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Nowadays, if I walk into a store -- any store -- and see that the employees are barefaced, I'm doing a quick about-face and walking right back out again. This woman is an idiot.

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She should have argued that masks violate her religious beliefs.

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No one's stopping you from practicing your religion that prohibits the wearing of ties, but a fine restaurant won't seat you just the same.

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She’ll file a new law suit when they come after her with a vaccine.

Her lawyer should be embarrassed when he can’t even plead the basic elements of a case.

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We might not be in this mess if we'd let the stupidest people on earth exercise their freedom to not wear seatbelts 20 years ago

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many ways, but none more so than in the notion that Darwinism isn't keeping up with the ability of blunt stupidity to reproduce before it accidentally kills itself in darkly hilarious ways.

The idiot gene has finally trumped the selfish gene in our tiny sliver of the evolutionary march of eons. It's Florida Man and his improbable progeny all the way down from here. On our current track, I give humanity another sixty to eighty years at best. In the longer term, the planet will survive our passing as a regrettable blip, won't miss us, will only be annoyed by the enduring plastic and nuclear waste we left behind.

As I like to say, too bad it's a fallen world. But that's only really true for Homo sapiens. We had a good run, invented Saran Wrap and got to the moon before we imploded out of spite, greed, mutual mass murder spurred by vanishingly trivial physiological and philosophical differences, and stark pig-ignorance.

Tech advances and the disjunctions of late-stage capitalism got us too far over the skis of our social evolution to cope, and thus we're maybe three generations away from our collective ABC Wide World of Sports "agony of defeat" fatal-crash moment.

I guess some it was pretty good: our music, art, poetry, dance, theater, architecture, maybe sport. Ah, well: it weren't enough to save us in the end. Truly sorry for everyone's grandkids, a shame you didn't do more to protect their legacy. Sic transit gloria mundi.

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Among the idiotic ideas that deserves to be killed off is the one that Darwin had anything to say about people who do stupid things being more likely to die.

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The folks behind the Darwin Awards jocularly named them in his spirit.

It's not about doing something stupid making you more likely to die. It's that lethal stupidity makes you less likely to reproduce: natural selection in action.

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