On Thursday, President Joe Biden went to Chicago to make his case for COVID-19 vaccination mandates. He warned that unvaccinated Americans were “overrunning” hospitals—thereby crowding out patients who needed care for heart attacks or cancer—and he accused them of jeopardizing the economy by scaring people away from shops and restaurants. Getting vaccinated, said the president, was a simple matter of “being patriotic, doing the right thing.”

Biden has been using this kind of language—moralizing the COVID debate and vilifying noncompliant Americans—for the past month. It’s a formula that Republicans have often exploited in other contexts. Here’s how it works: First, you identify a politically vulnerable minority. Then you accuse that minority of deviant behavior. You depict these people as a threat to everyone else, and you blame them for the country’s troubles. Over the years, conservatives have cynically applied this algorithm to many topics, such as homosexuality, welfare, immigration, Islam, and kneeling for the national anthem. But now it’s being turned against Republicans, because they’ve chained their party to a genuinely deviant minority: vaccine refusers.

Unlike Muslims or gay people, vaccine refusers really do pose an inherent threat to others. Yet Republican politicians proudly embrace them. In Congress, state legislatures, and the courts, conservative governors and lawmakers are fighting to block vaccine requirements—even requirements imposed by private employers—as the virus kills thousands of Americans each week. These politicians accuse progressives of “shaming” vaccine refusers and treating them like “second-class pariahs.” Often, they borrow language from the abortion rights movement, framing vaccination as a matter of “personal choice.” Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz defended NBA players who have declined COVID shots, tweeting “#yourbodyyourchoice.” On Tuesday, another abortion opponent, Sen. Mike Lee, pleaded that unvaccinated Americans “just want to make their own medical decisions.” His fellow pro-lifer, Sen. Ron Johnson, told vaccine proponents to butt out because “it’s not your body.”