America: OH MY GOD WHAT IF EBOLA COMES AND KILLS US ALL? Also America: Actually, polio wasn't so bad so long as you didn't get polio.

Could we just not do this, please? It has been a very long week, and month, and year, and it would be wonderful if we did not compound the ills of the rest of the news cycle with claims that refusing to vaccinate your children is the new civil rights movement.

[Anti-vaccine] Activists had earlier rolled out a sign during bill hearings that said “Welcome to Calabama, y’all” — a reference comparing Newsom, a liberal Democrat, to the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was infamous for his defiance of racial desegregation. After the bills were approved, some held signs stating, "Welcome to Nazifornia," complete with the Nazi symbol.

A group of mostly white, mostly well-off people marching through government hallways singing, "We Shall Overcome" in an effort to reintroduce polio is a bit too on the nose, in the America of 2019. There is indeed a right in this nation to harm your own children based on made-up conspiracy theories forwarded on by people who actually want to sell you bottles of, say, homeopathic paprika. Sure. But California Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove of Los Angeles, a member of the California Legislative Black Caucus, was not keen on people using that particular comparison to exercise it.

"This is a misappropriation of a movement that really is not over and proves to be challenging to overcome," Politico quoted her as saying. "The whole conversation around vaccinations is actually one about privilege and opportunity."

She and other lawmakers are angry, and when you're throwing cups of "what appeared to be blood" at state senators, and that's not even the thing people are maddest about, maybe you should sit your behind down and rethink your "movement."

It would be wonderful, truly wonderful, if we did not compound the problems of America 2019 with newly energized movements insisting that medical illiteracy is the hill you, and your children, and anyone who comes into casual contact with your children at an inopportune time will die on. In fact, though, it is merely another manifestation of the same disease that has stricken the nation everywhere else: an insistence that fraudulent “facts” are as legitimate as real ones, and that personal "beliefs" should trump scientifically proven information, and that the elite experts and thing-knowers are trying to oppress the common masses, what with all their knowing of things. The contents of my own head are equal to the entire collected wisdom of the human race, and I must therefore be considered an expert of equal expertise to anyone and everyone who has ever devoted themselves to the topic before I arrived on the scene, and how dare you suggest otherwise, and so forth. Ignorance as credential; semiliteracy tacked to the wall like a new degree.

Vaccines are safe. This is not conjecture: Injuries caused by even the most controversial of vaccines are vanishingly rare compared to the historic injuries inflicted by the things they are used to vaccinate against. That is the whole point. And while each parent retains the God-given Right to lose their child to a disease the rest of the civilized world had vanquished, duly noted, there is no "civil right" to give a thousand strangers smallpox or polio or rubella because you have the "belief" that all of the world's medical experts are, collectively, engaged in a great wide conspiracy against you. You are allowed to believe in chemtrails; you are not allowed to shoot down airliners passing overhead.

Yes, not vaccinating your children may sometimes mean that they are barred from places and activities that would put them in close contact with large numbers of other children who may or may not share your child's declared medical invincibility. This is the trade-off you can make.

But don't come at the rest of us with "We Shall Overcome" because you believe being able to spread smallpox if you damn well want to is a new civil right. This year has been too long and the news too grave for the rest of us to put up with that noise.