"Parental Rights": The Oregon GOP has dug in

All but three Republicans in the Oregon state senate are now ineligible to serve another term. 

They had too many unexcused absences. Their absences are intentional. 

They walked out to prohibit a quorum and therefore to stop legislation from moving forward. Oregon voters approved a law to discourage that exact tactic by prohibiting members with ten or more unexcused absences from serving again. Ten Republican senators did so anyway.

What's the fuss?

There are several fusses. One is that Democrats are trying to pass a law prohibiting the manufacture, importation, or possession of undetectable "ghost guns." They would also give local governments the ability to adopt rules restricting concealed carry of firearms in and around schools. Anything involving guns is a red line litmus test for Republican officeholders. Compromise risks a GOP officeholder facing a primary election challenge. There is a "not-one-inch," bright line on guns in GOP politics.

The other fuss is a bill that expands reproductive rights including abortion. The bill re-affirms the body autonomy and decision-making right of a pregnant person of any age. The bill, HB2002B, also includes a provision protecting "gender affirming care." That means Oregonians permit -- and the Oregon Health Plan includes -- hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries to align a patient's mind and body. These are now litmus-test issues for Republicans.

Abortion was a bright line for Republicans back when Roe v. Wade made prohibiting abortion impossible. They taught GOP voters to accept "abortion-is-murder" messaging. Republicans now understand the electoral peril of saying, flat out, that the fertilized egg is a human soul and ending it is murder. Messages have adjusted. Opposition to this bill focuses on protecting parental rights and protecting children from themselves. 

Oregonlive April 28, 2023

Oregon senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp wrote in an Oregonian guest column:

[T]his legislation will allow a minor at any age to have an abortion without parental knowledge or consent. A doctor may not disclose this information to a child’s parent unless the child provides explicit written permission – stripping away a parent’s right to know. . . .[I]t leaves children on their own to deal with the consequences of what might have been a crime, or at the very least a significant event deserving of parental guidance. 

He brings up the pedophile, "groomer" threat:

Lawmakers may very well be aiding and abetting pedophiles and sex-traffickers who can pressure kids into telling doctors that a boyfriend got them pregnant to avoid criminal repercussions.

Opponents of the law posit a pregnant 10-year-old: Surely such young child needs parental guidance. 

I have the opposite view. If a young girl finds herself pregnant  and she does not want to talk to the people she lives with -- or parent she does not live with -- then there is clearly a grave problem somewhere. In the recent famous Ohio case, abortion was prohibited to a ten-year-old. Ohio lawmakers decided the girl must bear the child, regardless of the opinion of the girl or her parents. Oregon's proposed law neither requires nor prohibits an abortion, nor does it stop the child from getting parental guidance. The bill does say that the parents cannot force their ten-year-old to carry a pregnancy to term against her will. I am OK with that. I would consider that child abuse. My own sense is that if a very young girl is pregnant, there is, by definition, a grave problem, likely at home. If so, let courts get involved.

Republican messaging on gender focuses on two fears. One is the "predator male." This involves the fear that person who is "really" a man, will invade women's spaces, including bathrooms or athletic competitions. The other is a belief that gender is a clear binary choice, male and female, created at the time of fertilization. Therefore, with all the current skirmishes about gender, we are experiencing a social contagion fad. People are speaking and acting out, claiming to choose their gender, when they cannot. Biology is biology, and it is fixed. Opponents argue we must protect children from this error, and taxpayers from paying for it. 

My own limited experience with people with untypical DNA, hormones, and orientations, and those who seek gender transition, are that they are victims of biology and that they may well have communication problems at home. 

Albinism

These gender ambiguous situations seem to me to be quirks of nature -- unusual but natural -- like left-handedness, or albinism, or eyes of different colors, or very high or low IQ.  A culture can shame and stigmatize these quirks, and many do. Or one can take a God-doesn't-make-mistakes, live-and-let-live attitude. My observation is that people with unusual biology have a hard path, made harder when culture and laws stigmatize them. I am going with the second approach. It seems kind, freedom-loving, and congruent with my Judeo-Christian upbringing. But I am not a Republican elected official and I do not need to win a Republican primary election.

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Easy Sunday: Visiting Boston

"Boston" belongs in quotation marks.

Boston -- the place, the idea, its role in American history -- extends well beyond its city limits. "Boston" is Lexington and Concord and Longfellow's poem of Paul Revere's ride. "Boston" is the adjacent city of Cambridge, home base of Harvard and MIT. "Boston" is its Puritan founders and their tradition of universal literacy, so "Boston" includes Horace Mann, the Boston Latin School, and the collection of colleges in and around Boston. "Boston" has always encouraged freethinkers, so "Boston" is Walden Pond, Thoreau, Emerson, Transcendentalism, and Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. "Boston" is John F. Kennedy. "Boston" extends out to Quincy, the home of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. "Boston" is cutting edge medicine and biotech, Mass General Hospital, and the other teaching hospitals in Back Bay. "Boston" is the nearby cities of Brookline, Revere, Malden, and Medford, for which my home town was named. "Boston" was the center of the American Revolution, then the center of Northern sentiment for abolition of slavery, and now it is the rival of Berkeley to be called the center for liberal progressive thought in America.

Tam Moore is visiting "Boston." 

Tam Moore has been doing journalism for 65 years, going back to his time as a reporter for the Oregon State University newspaper. He was a TV journalist for KOBI, a Jackson County Commissioner, and a print reporter for the Capital Press. He is a second pair of eyes looking at this blog after I think it finished for the day, finding most of my grammar and typing mistakes before I send out the e-mail version of this post--except possibly today, because he is on the road exploring America.

Tam Moore

 

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Boston, May 17, 2023

The Medford Moores are back on the road, resting and writing before the Boston Celtics begin their Eastern Conference second game with Miami. It’s not that we are Celtics fans – we did our best to root the Golden State Warriors into another championship run, and shifted to the Lakers when the Warrior mojo lost its spark – but we are here in Boston, soaking up 400 years of history in the seven days leading up to the Boston College graduation of Tyler Moore. We’d best be Celtic fans tonight.

At the top of the page is Park Street Church, where we didn’t go to worship Sunday morning because our departure from the hotel got delayed due to a bit of personal first aid on a stubbed toe. By the time we got there, the place was locked. But the Boston Common was crowded with locals and visitors enjoying a sunny 80-degree day. Kids were having their annual “Make Way for Ducklings” festival. Seniors like us were slowly strolling. Couples interested in each other were sunning themselves on the same ground which was a bivouac and parade ground for the British troops which enforced martial law on Boston in the 1775 run-up to what became the American Revolutionary War.

The Common has come a long way since Pilgrim folks with the Massachusetts Bay Company purchased the 48-acre site in 1634 to have livestock pasture for the village they established nearby. The Park Street Church next to the Common was started in 1818 by some Congregationalists concerned with the rise of Unitarianism and what they saw as the need to honor the
theology of a holy trinity. It was the congregation which sent all those missionaries to Hawaii and other far-away places.

The old, most of it well-preserved alongside the new. Towering skyscrapers dwarf the 217-foot-tall steeple at Park Street. Paul Revere’s house in the North End –built about 1680—is part of a well-kept complex of buildings telling the story of the Revolution through the eyes of one of the key participants in years leading up to 1776. We learned yesterday from Robert Shimp of the Revere House Foundation the Paul himself spent most of the War on Continental Army duty guarding one of the fortified islands in Boston Harbor. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow decades later made Revere’s ride a national legend.

Tomorrow, we are off the Lexington and Concord to learn about the Massachusetts’s militiamen who bloodied the nose of the British troops.

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Buy American

Buying American has a price. 

I took a quick glance at the cost of Asian call centers and the price of sending a container from China to the U.S.

Americans are re-thinking globalism. Politicians on both the populist left (Bernie Sanders) and the populist right (Donald Trump) have made a similar point that global trade creates problems in America. The Democratic establishment under Bill and then Hillary Clinton positioned Sanders as fringe. Trump changed the GOP. He condemns Paul Ryan-style free market conservatism and the GOP has mostly gone along. Market-oriented establishments of both parties were clear about who it was helping -- their donors -- but were in denial about who it was hurting. Trump changed it for Republicans. Democrats, too, are adjusting.

American's like things cheap. Business school economics is at odds with political life on the ground. Workers lose their jobs when factories move to low-wage countries, most conspicuously China. Workers are voters.   

Globalized world trade brought some 700 million people in China out of crushing poverty, vastly improving their lives. But it also meant that wages for American workers have been flat for 40 years. Democrats argued that more and better education was the magic bullet. Everyone could go to grad school or coding boot camp. Republican politicians caught on earlier than Democrats that most workers didn't want to change and didn't want to re-train. Republicans, especially Trump, said the problem was external not internal. Don't blame America. Don't blame the worker for being uneducated. Blame Mexico and China. 

That economic message lines up with the culture war message. Democrats want to fix Americans of their racism, misogyny, homophobia, right along with their job skills. Blame Americans. Republicans think old-fashioned Americans are just fine as they are. The problems are outside, either with woke ideas by liberals or job-stealing foreigners. Blame them.

I had a recent dose of buy-American reality. I experienced an unsatisfactory call to the help line of ADT, the alarm service for my farm house. A person spoke heavily accented English in a noisy, crowded call center. It wasn't his fault. I blamed ADT. Then I had a good experience when I called ADT the next day, having pressed the menu button for cancelling service. This agent was a native speaker of English in a quiet call center in Texas. ADT was making a business decision. "Help" was overhead, a cost, so go for cheap. "Cancel service" was lost revenue, so go for quality. 

Call center employees in the Philippines make about 25,000 Philippine pesos a month, which translates to about $450. Indian call center employees make about 15,000 Indian rupees a month, or $200. So there you have it. The American call center employee is at least seven times as expensive as offshoring it. Hard to compete on price.

I put on a tee shirt this morning. The tee shirt was an American brand made in China. I paid $15 for the tee shirt. Every 40 foot shipping container can carry about 50,000 tee shirts. Costs to ship from ports on the Pearl River Delta to Los Angeles are back to about $2,000. It costs four-cents per shirt to ship it here. The similar container could handle 75 full-size refrigerators, only $30 each on a $2,000-plus item. 

Americans who presume that physical distance and transportation costs will protect American workers need to re-think. Free worldwide communication and efficient shipping are probably good things for the world, but not for American workers. Protecting American workers means pitting them against American consumers, ourselves. Americans educated by free-market economics professors need to reflect on the "externalities" they learned about in the same classes. Free trade and a connected global economy creates victims here. They vote. 

We have seen in other countries, and now the U.S., that disgruntled people are open to populist demagogues. Trump is a symptom. Indicting and convicting him won't fix the underlying problem that created a large discontented group of people open to a populist demagogue. The politics of a democracy needs to adjust enough to protect democracy. It is in the interest of both parties to facilitate that.

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Medford School Board Vote: Follow-Up

Yesterday I wrote that Medford voters said "no" to a suspected conservative takeover of the Medford school board.

Some people thanked me. 

Ilex Brandenberger, an unseated incumbent, said I got things wrong. 

Another candidate, Curt Ankerberg, called me a "stupid m------f-----"

Incumbent School Board member Ilex Brandenberger said I misunderstood his politics and I was mistaken about why he lost his election. I appreciate hearing from him.

He wrote, saying he was not part of any conservative takeover coalition:

Peter, this is Ilex Brandenberger commenting. I am not the extremely right wing person you seem to be trying to make me out to be in this article. You won't see a MAGA flag anywhere near me, but I'm not a progressive either. I'm not registered with either political party. I do go to church, but that doesn't mean I want to ban books or bully trans people. In fact, I would really just like it if we could actually focus on issues that really matter to our kids and schools like making sure they are all getting a quality education and that teachers are well compensated. How did we get to the place where real governance issues no longer matter in choosing our leaders and now we are focused solely on culture war issues? I think we have a rough road ahead of us until we can answer that question.

That sounds to me like exactly the kind of earnest public-spirited person I want to see in offices like school boards. He had the bad luck to have been running against another such person. 

He had an explanation for why he lost. He said he didn't have the endorsement of the Medford Education Association, the teachers' union.

I think the main reason I didn't get elected is that I was sitting in a hotel room across from La Guardia Airport in NYC when the MEA endorsement interviews were going on and had to do the interview by phone. It was exceptionally bad luck that I ended up on an emergency business trip on the exact same day they were occurring. They would not reschedule or hold off a decision and confirmed that I only lost their endorsement because I wasn't physically there. I have been told that everyone who gets their endorsement gets elected. So, I'm pretty sure that's when I lost.

In very low turnout elections -- 22% -- where information about the candidates is hard to get, the support of a motivated group of voters may tip the balance in close races. Teachers and their families are such a group. Oregon sends a printed Voters Pamphlet to every household with a registered voter. Candidates provide their education and employment credentials and a statement of their goals in a half-page pre-set format. Even for people like myself, who actively seek out information about candidates, Voters Pamphlet entries are often the primary source of information. Usually candidates offer committee-polished statements of good intention, so there is a uniform anodyne quality to them. Still, a voter can draw inferences of their policy orientation from people and groups listed as endorsing the candidate. The Medford Education Association endorsed each of the four winning candidates. Maybe voters weren't making inferences about MAGA influence from lawn sign locations and ballot statements. Maybe people looked for the MEA endorsement and assumed that teachers knew what to look out for.

I got a flurry of letters from a losing candidate, Curt Ankerberg. He called me a "stupid m-----f-----." 

I published his comments in the comment section yesterday's post at the blogspot site. I post them only for their value in showing readers the thinking of this perennial Republican candidate and Trump supporter. Warning: His comments are vicious and obscene. He won almost half the votes in a Republican primary election for state senate, and he got 2,866 votes in this school board race. I disagree and disapprove of his opinions and language. His words should not be read as credible information about his targets. They reflect on him and the Republican voters who find him to their liking.

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Good news on Medford school vote

News stories warned that a national movement was afoot.

Medford school voters said "No" to it.

New York Times: 

"The Conservative School Board Strategy. Republicans are trying to use suburban fights over critical race theory and pandemic restrictions to energize their voters."

USC School of Public Policy: 

"The next battleground in U.S. politics? School boards"

NPR: 

"A coordinated nationwide agenda dominated local school board elections last year."

Southern Oregon voters on Tuesday voted to fill local offices for districts providing water, fire, libraries, and schools. Typically these are non-political, non-partisan, non-controversial offices. Citizens with a public-spirited cast of mind and a willingness to volunteer put themselves forward to stand for election. The office are unpaid and thankless. Voter turnout is typically low, and it was again this week. Statewide turnout was 25.3%. Locally it was 22%.

Something interesting happened locally. Two incumbent school board members lost. There were four election winners.

I was happy to see the results. 

Voters rejected candidates whose campaigns hinted at bringing the culture wars here to local schools. There is plenty of opportunity for controversy in K-12 education, going beyond the regular ones of teacher pay and benefits, school calendars, facilities, budgets, and educational programs to grow or shrink. Nationalized culture war battles have gone local over issues of Covid, vaccinations, library books, sex education, bathrooms, and curriculum. Current and likely GOP presidential candidates are sounding the alarm that schools are teaching that slavery and Jim Crow were racist and that European settlement and removal of Indians was genocidal, positions that reflect badly on Whites. They argue that elements of Critical Race Theory are sneaking into the K-12 curriculum, presenting American history as a series of challenges, which they consider unpatriotic. They argue that gender is binary, full stop, and that schools should reflect that in their bathrooms, pronouns, and libraries. They argue that "critical thinking" teaches children to question American history, not recognize its achievements. They argue that what political conservatives see and dislike in the progressive university settings are infecting our K-12 schools. They have a plan of action: Get onto local school boards to protect our children from liberals.

USC School of Public Policy

Local voters needed to feel their way in dim light to discern which candidates for school board were directly or indirectly part of that agenda. Yet they did so. 

Candidates who lost their elections had lawn signs posted in familiar places where Trump signs went up in 2016 and 2020. The local Republican Party establishment works to assist favored candidates in non-partisan races. The local GOP leadership has a reputation for being hyper-extreme, a hotbed of MAGA 2020 election denialism. Maybe voters saw the connection between nonpartisan candidates and the local GOP activists, and rejected them.

An incumbent school board member lost his election. He put this statement in his school board biography:

To best prepare students for a successful, independent and responsible adulthood, he strongly believes that public education should focus primarily on pure academic pursuits like reading and math and avoid curricula that promotes divisive, politically charged social issues. The tax-payer funded schools should concentrate on fact-based academic curriculum that promotes education, not indoctrination.

Maybe voters read between the lines and considered this a hint of future MAGA troublemaking drama, and rejected that and him with it.  

Candidates whose Voters Pamphlet statements mentioned religious affiliations and support by right wing faith advocates lost their elections. Candidates whose Voters Pamphlet statement mentioned support by Medford teachers won.  Maybe people made a choice.

Maybe it was campaign quality. Maybe the people who won had better campaigns, and I just didn't see them, since I don't spend much time with Facebook and no time at all on Instagram, and that is where campaigns take place now. Or maybe the winners knocked on more doors. Maybe they had bigger networks of friends. 

It is hard to know. But for some reason, in a low turnout election, the people whose campaigns seemed to indicate that their primary interest was the ongoing non-political operation of the schools won their elections. And the people whose campaigns hinted at a culture war agenda lost.

Fine with me.

[Note:  I invite comments from candidates who feel I may have mistaken or misrepresented their positions.  I will publish them with at least equal visibility as is this post.  Curt Ankerberg, a losing candidate, has already written a comment, which is posted below in the comments section. Caution. It contains strong language. I deleted his comments about the County Clerk and County Administrator because I consider them defamatory.

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The un-cola

The GOP is not stuck with Trump. GOP voters have options.

Most of his opponents are trying to avoid confrontation. They are the "Un-Cola."

Chris Christie is the exception.

People who remember the 1960s know about 7UP, the "uncola". Their idea was to position the big two brands, Coke and Pepsi,  as "The Establishment," and 7UP as the primary alternative. It wasn't a frontal assault on the beverage leaders. 7UP didn't say cola tasted bad, or even that 7UP tasted better. Instead, 7Up was new and cool, an alternative.

7UP rose in American consciousness to be the third place brand but it did not displace colas. Coke, then and still, is number one, the real thing. 

There is an "un-cola, 7UP" quality to the campaigns of people hoping to replace Trump. They are un-Trump, jostling Trump with an implied criticism, but not confronting him.  Ron DeSantis is positioning himself as a stronger-flavored Trump. Trump opposes abortion but DeSantis opposes it at six weeks. Trump attacks woke progressives, but DeSantis makes acknowledging diversity, equity, and inclusion illegal in Florida public education. He is a younger, nastier Trump, but not anti-Trump.

Mike Pence does not criticize Trump. Pence implies he is the cleaned-up Trump. Pence is Trump in policy, but without the bitter aftertaste of lawbreaking, womanizing, and sedition. 

Nikki Haley is a fresh alternative to Trump, not his critic. In her New Hampshire Town Hall events I heard not one word of criticism of Trump. She said nothing about the 2020 election or January 6. She said she was honored to have been made Ambassador to the UN by him, but said nothing about the resignations by Trump's cabinet members in disgust and opposition to him. She is female. She has a sunny disposition. She smiles. America isn't enduring carnage, not in South Carolina at least, where Boeing and BMW are opening factories and hiring people. She is available if, for any reason, one is looking around for a candidate.

Vivek Ramaswamy is another un-cola candidate. He defends Trump and says the investigations and prosecutions of him for crimes are unjust. He says that he would immediately pardon the January 6 rioters. He denounces ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governmental) investing. He opposes affirmative action. He denounces "climatism," "Covidism," and "genderism" and calls them false secular religions. He has bold ideas and a positive outlook, if anyone wants that.

Chris Christie is the exception. Christie is a brawler who openly says that the way to be the GOP nominee is to confrontT rump. “You have to be fearless, because he will come back — and right at you. And that means you need to think about who’s got the skill to do that, and who’s got the guts to do that, because it’s not going to end nicely.”

Christie goes beyond saying Trump can not win. He says Trump should not win. "The only person he cares about is him[self.]"  That crosses the Rubicon in the GOP primary: Trump should not be re-elected. Christie describes un-cola candidates: 

They’re going to wriggle right up next to him and say "I’m almost like him, but I’m not quite as bad.” Let me tell you something, everybody. That’s going to lose.

Chris Christie embarrassed himself in 2016 when he became a sycophant of Trump, who then humiliated him by having him prepare Trump's transition plan and then flagrantly discarded Christie's work. Christie, of all the candidates, likes a direct face- to-face fight. I watched him tell New Hampshire audiences that for them to understand him they needed to remember that he was Sicilian, the home of the mafia. We are direct, he told them. We don't hedge and pussy-foot. We confront. 

 “You have to be fearless, because he will come back — and right at you. And that means you need to think about who’s got the skill to do that, and who’s got the guts to do that, because it’s not going to end nicely.”

 Liz Cheney may have laid the groundwork, but the GOP was nowhere near ready to hear it. GOP voters may never be ready. But the prosecutions may erode Trump credibility and Fox has become wary of looking uncritical of Trump. Still, Trump will not fall of his own weight, leaving a space open for a non-confrontational alternative.  A Republican candidate will need to take him down. Possibly Chris Christie. He may want revenge.

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Guns: empowered self-reliance

"Walk like a man, talk like a man
Walk like a man, my son
No woman's worth crawlin' on the earth
So walk like a man, my son
Oh wee ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-wee-ooh
Walk, walk, walk, walk."

                Walk Like a Man, 1963, The Four Seasons 

I encountered that song as an adolescent. I understood the emotion behind the lyrics. A guy and girl were breaking up and he didn't mope about it. He was proud, self-reliant.  He walked and talked like a man.

The same year I stumbled upon Ralph Waldo Emerson in the school library and read his essay, Self Reliance. I was thrilled by his words. Be an independent, empowered non-conformist. Yes! Emerson was more work than Top-40 music on KBOY and KYJC, the local A.M. radio stations, but there was a confluence in timing. It accompanied that burst of testosterone that happens to boys of 13.

I remember feeling pumped.

A thoughtful reader of this blog sent me a comment on gun culture in America. He is experimenting with breaking out of his ultra-civilized, city-boy life of high-tech business. He goes off on weekends into wild places to hunt with a bow and arrows. He carries a handgun. He is noticed something about that experience.

Packing my revolver in the wild when I am sometimes miles from the nearest road and out of cell range seems prudent, but it does not make me feel "invincible."  It's only when I find myself still carrying it (if I have no safe place to store it) when I am near populated areas that I experience that burst of empowerment. I don't understand the psychology or neurobiology of what toting a gun in public does to you, but for me it creates this very strange, inflated sense of importance, power, and invincibility. The closest kind of feeling I can think of is when I got my drivers license and my first car.

I can relate. When I turned 16 I got a drivers license and could drive! I became fully human. I was empowered. 

My correspondent observed people at the gun club where he practices shooting.

Something very powerful happens every time I holster my side arm. I am suddenly profoundly aware that I am carrying a lethal weapon. I subconsciously begin to look for potential threats. I thought this was just me, but the thing I notice at the shooting range is that others seem to be getting ready for a kind of urban battlefield. Many of my acquaintances who carry have a nonchalant bravado in their relationships to their firearms. The clubhouse has a poster of Trump's face on a Rambo body, and it's not considered ironic.

He includes a warning for Democrats.

If you have enough voices telling you are entitled to it, and other people want to take it away from you, you've got a fight on your hands. I think its grip is rooted in the feeling of identity and agency. We aren't having a policy debate.

The gun issue looks like a policy debate, but it isn't. I got my 92-year-old father to stop driving--with difficulty. He would have answered polls saying that 92-year-olds with vision and mobility problems must not drive. That was his policy answer. But he, himself, drove well past the time when he should have stopped.  It was an identity issue. Losing ability to drive was a watershed event of of dis-empowerment.

I think we have a gun problem in America. They are ubiquitous, so they get used. It is crazy to have mass ownership of guns in the 21st Century, but it persists. Democrats have dug in as the party that wants legislation to limit gun access. They blame the NRA and Republican officeholders for a political system that is increasing gun access, not reducing it--notwithstanding the polls. 

The polls deceive. Americans are not rational here, and polls measure what people want for other people, not what they want for themselves or feel in their hearts. A great many people resist having them taken away. 

Democrats will understand the gun issue better if they liken it to the effect of trying to take away cars from people who are statistically dangerous drivers, people under the age of 25 or over the age of 75. It would not be easy or popular.

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