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City officials in one California community have covered a local skate park with sand to keep bored teenagers out, thus reportedly leaving one diabetic teen who “needs to stay moving” in an exceptionally tough spot, and also raising the ire of liberty-minded conservatives.

“Noli Stark and his mom sat in their car in the parking lot looking at San Clemente’s popular skate park, gates shut and sand covering the surface of his favorite playground,” the Orange County Register reported last Thursday.

According to his mother, Jen, it was her diabetic son’s “last bit of freedom.”

“It was all he had left. He was devastated,” she said.

But to hear local officials tell it, kids on skateboards are “the greatest public-health threat imaginable,” as Republican Sen. Ted Cruz put it in a tweet posted late Saturday:

Clearly, the greatest public- heath threat imaginable…a kid on a skateboard. Young people, remember, this is what Big-government statist Democrats do—they take away your freedom. https://t.co/VBCmnZRvfC — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 19, 2020

2/2 And to all the Lefties defending California’s idiocy, skating alone poses ZERO public health threat to anybody. You want to enforce social distancing in public spaces, fine, but filling a skate park with sand—so nobody can use it—is authoritarian abuse of power. — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 19, 2020

Locals share Cruz’s concerns.

“The move by the city to cover the concrete at the Ralph’s Skate Court with gritty, grainy sand has local skaters irked, wondering if such drastic measures were needed to keep people out of the park. Some wonder if the sandy surface may damage the skate park tucked in the hills of the seaside community,” the Register noted.

Yet such drastic measures are increasingly becoming the norm in many cities and states across the country.

In Michigan, Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer essentially banned large stores from selling “non-essential” items such as gardening seeds, furniture, children’s toys, sports equipment, etc. Included among sports equipment, FYI, are ellipticals and treadmills — both of which are useful for those who want to “stay moving” at home.

Earlier his month Greenville, Mississippi Mayor Errick D. Simmons, a Democrat, banned all in-person church services, including drive-in church services. He later reversed his decision, but only after backlash erupted when the parishioners of one church were ticketed for attending an Easter drive-in service.

Meanwhile, multiple localities throughout the nation “have passed measures to prevent property managers from booking short-term rentals through websites like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com,” according to CNBC.

“Short-term rentals have been banned across the entire states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Delaware, Maine and Vermont. Numerous other counties and cities have taken similar steps, including Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Sonoma County, California,” the outlet noted in a report Thursday.

For property owner Anneliese Caserta and her husband, these bans make no sense.

“We have to decline reservations every single day. It’s unbelievable,” she said to CNBC. “To me it seems that the safest place to be if you’re going to go on vacation is a house. I think it would be safer than a hotel, pressing elevator buttons and sharing doors with everybody in close quarters.”

While that sounds like logical, common-sense thinking, it doesn’t appear to be shared by lawmakers, who’ve displayed an unseemly zeal to keep upping the ante.

Case in point: Last month Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, shuttered 600+ liquor stores, spurring residents into rushing to other states for bootleg liquor in such high numbers that neighboring state governors were forced to take action:

Yo Pennsylvania. Time to open up your own damn liquor stores. https://t.co/5ywtjwbxPS — Rachael Larimore (@RachaelBL) April 13, 2020

“With few legal options for purchasing spirits inside state borders, residents have flooded liquor stores in other states, with one in New Jersey choosing to temporarily shut down last month because the influx of customers made social distancing impossible,” Reason magazine reported last Wednesday.

“The boom in out-of-state business has been so large, and so dangerous to public health, that out-of-state governments are now prohibiting purchases by Pennsylvania residents.”

These seemingly forever-expanding restrictions have grown so severe that they’ve even attracted the attention of Attorney General Bill Barr.

“I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is – you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people,” he said in a Fox News interview two weeks ago.

“And I think, you know, when this – when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed, but allow them to use other ways – social distancing and other means – to protect themselves.”

Listen via FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle“:

(Source: Fox News

While some governors have heeded such advice, others have clearly chosen to ignore it, as demonstrated by what happened last week in San Clemente, California.