The COVID-19 pandemic has been running strong for about a year and a half now, and there hasn’t been a single week during any of it when Republican elected officials weren’t more invested in mocking the pandemic than fighting it. The rapid invention of a vaccine that could stop it was a medical miracle; now that full Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval has been granted, the choice to include COVID-19 vaccination as part of the U.S. military’s full regimen of vaccines was a no-brainer.

If you’re going to throw people from all across the country into grubby battlefield tents and tell them they’ll maybe be able to get a shower next Tuesday, you’re going to want them vaccinated against all of the world’s most deadly diseases so that your troops last long enough to least point guns at the enemy you’ve put them in front of. It’s … not controversial.

To the party of tax-dodging international extortion slash sex crimes slash insurrection, however, now it’s controversial. Outrageous, even. And if the enablers of hard-right fascism can’t prevent the military from requiring the vaccines, they’re going to at least do their best to paint military members who refuse vaccination due to crank conspiracy theories as noble heroes or conscientious objectors or what-the-heck-ever.

United States senators and attempted topplers of U.S. government Ted Cruz, Roger Marshall, Jim Lankford, and Tommy, sigh, Tuberville are introducing a new bill demanding that soldiers who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19 not be pushed out of the military with dishonorable discharges for disobeying the orders, but instead be given honorable discharges.

Why is COVID-19 vaccination refusal special? Because it’s the Republican Party’s current favorite disease, that’s why. If measles had killed half a million people in a year then people who refused measles shots would be the party’s new pockmarked faces of liberty and Republican senators would be rushing to demand troops be allowed to opt out of that one as well.

Being familiar with nigh-on-several Americans who have served in the military, I have it on good authority that this is not, in fact, how the military works. In the military they line you up and you get as damn many shots as the books say to give you, the ones who pass out afterwards are carried to the side so they don’t clog traffic, and if you refuse you find yourself outside the base and you can find your own damn way home.

But again, it’s been very important for Republicans to differentiate this pandemic disease from all the others, because this was the pandemic disease that was allowed to kill a half million Americans under the bored watch of an incompetent pathological liar the party had hitched its entire reputation to. So here’s Cruz saying words at us defending his new stance:

“It is the same way we dishonorably discharge those convicted of serious crimes such as treason, desertion, sexual assault, and murder. Forcing all service members, including pregnant women and those who have already had COVID-19, to receive the vaccine is just one more example of President Biden and his administration putting politics ahead of science.”

I cannot possibly convey to you how torturous it is to be forced to continually pay attention to Ted Damn Cruz. It’s like having someone hand you earbuds demanding you listen to their favorite song, but it turns out the earbuds are four-inch rusty nails and the “song” is that they’ve tied a live rat to the flat side of each of them.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the punishment for “treason” is a heck of a lot more than getting discharged, and refusing an order has been reason for dishonorable discharge for some time now, and refusing a vaccine that will prevent you from murdering your tentmates when the FDA has now said its safe and the only people arguing otherwise are Facebook groups heavily influenced by foreign troll factories … feels pretty close to desertion to me?

Mostly, though, this is yet another case in which Republicans continue to choose the oddest possible hills to die on. We’re in a pandemic. A deadly pandemic, one that has now killed 675,000 Americans in less than two years. But at no point during any of that have any of the Republican senators in question launched any substantial effort to actually keep Americans from dying; time after time, the only thing that rouses them is the notion that maybe it might be patriotic to do not a damn thing to quell the pandemic and maybe the real heroes here are the ones who don’t want to wear masks or get vaccines because [generic burping noises].

If you’re in the military and not willing to get a vaccine for the one thing most likely to result in military deaths in the next six months, you shouldn’t be in the military. You also shouldn’t get to pretend you served honorably if you refused vaccination because you believed some Facebook conspiracy theory over your own commanders.

Mostly, though, it’s just impressive how narrow Republican pandemic concerns continue to be. We’re supposed to consider the deaths of 675,000 Americans no big deal and nothing worth taking drastic action over. But the thought that a soldier directly defying orders in a way that endangers the lives of those around them can expect to be treated accordingly, now that rouses them out of their naps.