Sometimes in Life, You Get What You Ask For
By 
When coronavirus cases began increasing in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in late July, Pastor Paul Van Noy prayed with his congregation that the city council would not pass a mask mandate.
“I don’t want to be told I have to wear a mask,” he said at the lectern. “We’re adults and we don’t need the government to tell us what to do.”
A little over a month later, he and his wife contracted the virus and he has landed in the hospital’s intensive care unit struggling to breathe, he said in a statement this week.
“I haven’t taken this Covid seriously enough,” his wife, Brenda, said on Facebook Sept. 4, shortly after her husband was admitted to the ICU.
A self-proclaimed “no-masker,” Van Noy told the worshipers gathered at Candlelight Christian Fellowship on July 22 that his first inclination was to resist complying with a local mask ordinance. After some consideration, he said the congregation was bound by the Bible to follow any ordinance requiring masks passed by their local leaders — but he prayed it would not come to that.
That this was Coeur d’Alene seems predetermined. There is a very strong rule of thumb about Idaho–the more beautiful the area, the crazier the white people are.