Pillar I · Liberty
Medical Freedom, Public Health, and Food Integrity
“The body is the citizen's, not the state's.”
No medical mandates. Conscience protection for providers. Honest food labeling: lab-grown is not meat. Respect voters on medical marijuana; strengthen the program with real doctor-patient standards.
Where I stand
- Oppose every form of medical mandate.
- Protect medical conscience for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.
- Lab-grown protein is classified as adulterated, not meat.
- Soft drinks excluded from SNAP.
- Strengthen medical marijuana with real doctor-patient requirements.
Pushback, answered
The hard questions, answered straight.
These are the real objections this position gets, with the same answers Zac gives in person. No talking points. No dodges.
“Conscience protection sounds like permission to deny care.”
Look at who it actually protects: a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist who cannot in good conscience perform or provide one particular thing. Forcing that person does not create more care, it drives good people out of medicine, and anyone who has waited months for an appointment knows this state has no providers to spare. Patients stay free to choose their providers and providers keep their conscience. That is how a free state handles deep disagreement: nobody gets conscripted. The same principle that protects your medical decisions protects the people in the white coats.
“What about the next pandemic?”
Public health is a real job and the state has a real role: gather honest information, share it fast, and trust free people to act on it. What the state must never do is force medicine on a citizen as the price of a job, a classroom, or a normal life. We tried coercion and it burned trust to the ground, and broken trust is the deadliest public health outcome there is because it carries into the next emergency. A government that levels with people gets cooperation.
“You call yourself a free-market conservative. Why is government in the meat case?”
Because markets run on honest labels. Meat is an animal, raised on land, by somebody, and around Rapid City that somebody is often your neighbor. A product grown in a stainless steel tank is something else, and when it sells under the rancher's word the label is lying. A lying label is not competition, it is fraud. Sell what you want and call it what it is.
“The marijuana plank is a backdoor repeal.”
It is the reverse. South Dakota voters approved medical marijuana in 2020 and I respect that vote without qualification. A medical program earns the word medical through a real doctor, a real patient, and a real relationship between them. Strengthening those requirements protects the sick people the program was passed for and protects the program from abuse that would turn it into a punchline. The fastest way to lose medical marijuana is to let it lose its integrity.