The Whitmer rule is particularly daft because an America that successfully adapted to social distancing would be a country with more homeowners doing D.I.Y. projects, more people starting backyard gardens (victory gardens?) and more people making ends meet by picking up work that doesn’t require being indoors — work like, well, landscaping and house painting.

Every seed pack and paint can Home Depot sells is thus a small blow for semi-normalcy, for getting on with the forms of life that we can get on with, and a government that insists that you can buy only food and paper towels is making its own mission that much harder.

This doesn’t just apply to government policy. The mayor of Louisville, Ky., earned a lot of well-deserved flak, and a slap-down in court, for trying to prevent churches from holding drive-in services — not something I’m quite sold on liturgically, but still a creatively adaptive way to achieve semi-normalcy on Sunday morning.

But some religious authorities, too, have acted with anti-adaptive zeal.