Easter has come and gone. Being non-religious, my favorite thing about Easter is the annual opportunity to point out that there is far better evidence for the existence of the Easter Bunny than there is for Bigfoot. That upsets the Bigfoot crowd. As such, it’s a better gift than a big old basket of Easter candy — without any calories or tooth decay.

This year, we got an Easter issue courtesy of Idaho’s own Ammon Bundy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Bundys, Ammon is the son of Cliven Bundy, a rancher whose 15 minutes of infamy came via a 2014 standoff with the BLM over grazing rights on Federal land in Nevada. Not one to live in the shadow of his old man, Ammon, in 2016, organized an armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge over, as far as I can tell, stupors and vapors. Even Cliven is rumored to have thought it was a bad idea.

Cliven Bundy at least had an issue. I’m quite sure that he was wrong, in terms of both the substance of his complaint against the BLM and how he articulated his protest, but there was at least a kernel of something there. He might have been dead wrong, but at least the matter of contention wasn’t manufactured entirely from whole cloth.

The Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation, on the other hand, was just plain stupid. And it got someone killed. To be unrepentantly responsible for that you have to be a special kind of knucklehead. Like the kind who encourages people to assemble, defying stay-at-home orders, in the middle of a pandemic.

Yep, it’s true. Ammon Bundy was on the news in the days leading up to Easter questioning the authority of stay-at-home orders and encouraging large gatherings to celebrate Easter Sunday despite them.

Bundy is not alone in this. In the past few weeks, there have been all kinds of wingnuts jumping up and down like their pants are on fire and waving their pocket constitutions around in the air over stay-at-home orders.

Now in a technical sense there may be some small amount of merit to these complaints. Personally I don’t know. That’s the purview of legal scholars — but I’m not hearing howls of protest from them. Regardless, I try not to rely on legal advice more than I have to from people who can’t even read the plain language in a BLM grazing contract.

It’s well-known that I am far from certain that extreme social distancing is the best single response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus has wrought two problems: one medical and one economic. I’m quite sure that in the fullness of time the latter of those will spawn the most serious repercussions. I have many questions as to why, if we were going to invent trillions of dollars, we didn’t spend it at least some of it on ramping up our ability to treat patients — something that had the potential to invent jobs and stimulate the economy.

As this crisis has worn on, it’s become apparent to me and probably most of you that there are very few fully competent people in charge of our response to it at the federal level. For the most part, our response appears to be akin to that of people trapped in an airplane, one that the pilot’s bailed out of, slapping at all of the colored buttons on the cockpit console hoping that one of them lands the plane.

So what? Most people, including elected officials, aren’t particularly good in the pocket. Shall I fan you gently so you don’t go into shock?

At this point it doesn’t matter what people, who like me have misgivings about our response, think. What matters is making the response that society has chosen work. That’s everyone’s obligation as a citizen. And you make social distancing work by avoiding others as much as possible. Not by encouraging the congregation of large numbers of people just to show the governor what he can do with his stinking stay-at-home order.

The Ammon Bundys of the world go on a lot about their “rights.” I say this straight to them. Yeah, you got rights. But yours end where everyone else’s begin. If you want to learn more about that I suggest you look up another word found pretty close in the dictionary: “responsibility.”

I actually, to a degree, share Bundy’s concerns. I’m not completely onboard with either stay-at-home orders or some federal management of public lands. But the last thing I’d consider in response would be threatening federal employees or openly encouraging people to defy the governor’s stay-at-home order. That’s not because I’m afraid of the consequences either. It’s because such actions are disrespectful of legitimate authority supported by the vast majority of my fellow citizens.

It’s also directly disrespectful to the individuals involved who are, for the most part, just trying to do their job.

If you are going to insist on respect you ought to be willing to grant it as well. I see no evidence that the Bundys of the world get any of that. I’m almost positive that their knowledge of pronouns is restricted to I and me.

Dragging Jesus into it is probably not a good idea either. I don’t know that much about Jesus, but I suspect, based on what I do know, that if he found out that some wingnut was trying to get people needlessly exposed to a potentially fatal disease in his name, he’d puke. Then he’d probably get pissed.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, consultant and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising children, llama farming, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His video blog: “Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I” may be found at facebook.com/HowlinattheMoonin251.