I have a follow-up post at Mirror of Justice to the post immediately below. A bit:

But as the crisis reaches a second stage–an emergency of a different kind, now a more chronic or enduring condition–and as discretionary government decisions are made both as respects relaxing the closures and prosecuting violations of rules, the powerful psychological draw of equality as equal treatment starts to assert itself. Discretionary decisions require discrimination, and it’s at this point that considerations of unfairness become stronger in people’s psyche.

The trouble is that resentments about unequal treatment depend upon other, deeper judgments about the nature and value of various kinds of human activities. These judgments are signaled by the use of terms like “essential” but they aren’t really resolved by them. Partisans of one or another sort of human activity or way of life then develop arguments for distinguishing the truly essential from the less essential, but these are invariably thought to be spurious or worse by partisans of another sort of human activity or way of life. The arguments about equality really are only cover for other sorts of arguments that it would not be possible to resolve without the rhetorical appeal to equality. The real disagreements go not only to different ways of life, but to different conceptions of the good or goods of any particular human activity. Consider religious observance. If one’s view is that all of the true goods of religious observance can be obtained individually, at home, in solitary prayer in front of a screen, then one will think that distinguishing between churches and liquor stores–treating the goods of the human activities that these places foster unequally–is perfectly justified. But if one’s view of the true goods of religious observance is very different, then one will not accept these arguments.