Laschet and Stamp were right

The Corona years were a time of beatings - for Armin Laschet and Joachim Stamp. As Prime Minister and Kita Minister in North Rhine-Westphalia, the two dared to make some highly controversial moves to relax the corona protection measures for small children, among other things.

This course cost her dearly. It was not only on social media that they received a moral condemnation that could hardly be increased: they were personally responsible for the deaths of children. They are on the same level as criminals, they are "child killers". In addition, they received a flood of death threats and the worst insults (Laschet and Stamp occasionally provided insight into these letters).

Moral disgust also shaped some of the criticism of the then red-green opposition in the country. Quite apart from the infamous allegation that Laschet and Stamp are not at all concerned with their relaxation of the welfare of children, but only to satisfy the entrepreneur's desire for available workers. So they are not only criminals, but also puppets of capital.

But now the two experienced belated satisfaction. Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who was always on the side of Laschet’s critics during the Corona years, recently admitted that daycare centers were not sources of infection during the pandemic and were not drivers of contagion.

In retrospect, the daycare closures “were therefore not necessary”. Studies in 2020 and 2021 had already suggested this assessment (which Laschet and Stamp had referred to). But now, with Lauterbach, the authority, the guarantor par excellence of all opponents of relaxation, has rehabilitated those responsible in NRW at the time.

Laschet and Stamp had by no means followed a radical (or even always coherent) course. After the first lockdown in 2020 with its extensive daycare closures, they simply focused their attention on the suffering of small children and caring parents (especially women) faster than others. They lent an ear to the pediatricians who had warned of a tide of physical, intellectual and psychological disorders in children.

And they took the early indications from research seriously that daycare centers were not drivers of a pandemic. From all of this, they came to the conclusion that the best interests of the child should from now on be taken more seriously in a large number of individual decisions – at least a little more than in many other federal states.

They remained true to this resolution even when the majority of Germans clearly began to alienate the NRW line. Which was a heavy burden for Laschet, the candidate for chancellor at the time. Nevertheless, the two of them pushed through increasingly generous hardship regulations in subsequent lockdowns in the daycare centers in North Rhine-Westphalia.

They extended the opening hours more courageously than others. And limited the daycare quarantine rules more offensively (in terms of duration as well as the question of whether and how many contact persons of an infected child have to be quarantined). And because politicians like to be right from time to time, one can concede to them: They were right with that (by no means with all other decisions in the Corona years).

With all the deserved satisfaction that the two may feel in view of the Lauterbach turnaround - there is more at stake: the political dispute at the time not only became hateful, but also almost delusional. Apodictic judgments with maximum moral charge were fired on a recognizably incomplete database.

And what else is delusional if not the belief that one can make definitive judgments based on preliminary knowledge? This is how contemporaries act (not only) in social media on a daily basis. But the late rehabilitation of these two waddling men of the nation makes it particularly clear what we all have to learn again and again: the self-righteous pleasure in outrage, condemnation and slating is the enemy of enlightened, civilized coexistence.