Local actor won’t stop singing at church, says be ‘forgiving to opposite points of view’

As part of the recent mandates for COVID-19 announced by Governor Jay Inslee, people who attend a church service are being asked not to sing. One local man, Tony nominated actor Chad Kimball, took to Twitter to express his disagreement with the new rules, and got a bit of heat in return.

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“Just as I was leaving church on Sunday, his new edict came out, and let me just say that we’ve been following the rules,” Kimball told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show. “We’ve been doing what we can to keep other people safe and wearing masks and doing all of those things. But I’ve been feeling lately that these these edicts and mandates have just gotten stricter, and more powerful and brazen, and less about science, which is a troubling thing.”

“So on Sunday, I felt led by the spirit, if you will, to fight back a little bit in about 280 words or less, which isn’t the best place to be able to take a stand. But what a stand I did take, and I’ve gotten a little bit of heat,” he added.

Both Kimball and Dori expressed their concern that the cure for the COVID-19, namely the lockdowns, are doing more harm than good, especially for young people.

“There’s so many other parts of this pandemic that are equally as harmful to people,” Kimball said. “And my heart really goes out to the kids because my family has been touched by a couple of families near us whose children have committed suicide, who otherwise would probably be clinging on if they could be with their friends, and they could be with a social circle that’s outside of social media, really.”

“I think that we ought to be forgiving toward people who believe that the lockdowns are generally more hurtful than helpful,” he added. “I think we ought to be able to say, OK, that’s a good point of view, and that has logic and merit, as we should say to the other side … people who believe that it’s really the best thing to follow every edict. I understand and I respect your opinion and your fear, frankly, we all have fear.”

Kimball says it seems anyone who is critical of the lockdowns is viewed as evil.

“I think what I don’t like is the idea that if you are in any way critical of lockdowns or any aspect of lockdowns that you ought to be branded as kind of an evil zealot when the science is actually pretty pretty clear that locking people down … will harm their lives inextricably in the long run,” he said. “And I’m just worried about the kids and their futures because we have evidence that this kind of thing does not end well for them.”

After posting to Twitter that he would not allow a governor or anyone to stop him from singing or worshipping, Kimball received a lot of replies from fellow Broadway actors and others.

“I understand people are afraid and they want to lash back at something, and they want to speak out and and be heard,” he said. “And, you know, the passion that they have underneath there, and a lot of us, we sit in bubbles, and it’s hard for us to reach out and try and see an opposite or another view point.”

“A lot of these people are very learned, and so I understand their fury, and I understand their rage. We’re all kind of feeling it, aren’t we? … So again, I think we ought to be forgiving, but we ought to be able to speak what we think is the truth without being pounded into the ground, as it were,” he added.

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Kimball recommends that everyone be a bit more skeptical of the information they’re “being fed.”

“We’ve come a point in our society where we kind of just take as gospel, for lack of a better word, what we hear on the news,” he said. “And we want to be agreeable people. We want to think that there is no evil or malice behind any of these dictates. But earlier Americans probably would have been a lot more skeptical than we are now.”

“I would just challenge everybody to be a little forgiving to opposite points of view,” Kimball added. “Otherwise we’re going to have this — we’re headed there now — but this idea that you can’t even name your opinion without being called evil, or that you’re responsible for killing people. … We ought to be a little more skeptical of what we’re being fed, and trying our best to be able to keep one another safe as reasonably as we can.”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.