Don’t punish small businesses by treating their decision to reopen — or not — as a purity test.

Last weekend, Jenn Jones, who owns the Creature Studio hair salon and spa in Atlanta, told me that her business would go under if she didn’t reopen by June. So she’s reopening. She was slowly collecting masks and gloves for her employees, and she had redesigned her salon space to accommodate the social distancing recommended by the Georgia Board of Cosmetology and Barbers.

Her decision does not signal any support for Mr. Kemp. “I don’t align with his policies whatsoever,” she said, echoing a position taken by business owners and politicians across the state. It’s not about politics; it’s about survival.

But you wouldn’t grasp the complexity of these decisions from the responses of people watching them play out from afar. On social media and over email, customers and neighbors are threatening to boycott businesses that reopen, regardless of the degree to which they consider customers’ safety. People on my own neighborhood website are circulating lists of local businesses that do and do not open as a pandemic purity test of sorts, intended to guide the buying decisions people will make when the pandemic is over.

Somehow, we’ve reached the point where caring about public health has become a progressive issue, while the nation’s economy has become a conservative one. This division is false; no one should have to choose between financial annihilation and helping to spread a deadly disease. But thanks to unforgivable failures of political leadership, business owners in Georgia are bearing the burden of that choice — and the same will happen in every state that follows our lead.

We have dangerous tensions between our state and local governments.

The governor’s decision came as a surprise to our mayors, who were not consulted or informed about his executive order in advance — and were barred by one of its clauses from issuing local orders more or less restrictive than his.

Many felt the choice was the wrong one for their communities. Bo Dorough, a Democrat, is the mayor of Albany, Ga., which at one point in the pandemic had the most Covid-19 deaths per capita outside New York City. He pleaded with the governor to “recognize there are exceptions.” Atlanta’s Democratic mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who described seeing people lined up for haircuts and manicures in the days following the reopening announcement, said, “What we are essentially saying in Georgia is, ‘Go bowling and we’ll have a bed waiting on you.’”