LET TERS
BUTT SEX
Lon, [Letters 6/30] when I was reading
your response to the editor in the Weekly I
opened up the Bible and opened it to
Ezekiel Chapter 16. “Now this was the sin
of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters
were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned;
they did not help the poor and needy. They
were haughty and did detestable things
before me. Therefore I did away with them
as you have seen.”
The Christian god did not mention a
thing about the lovely butt sex that must have
been going on in Sodom when accounting
for the sins of Sodom. Arrogant people
who turn away the poor and needy are
the sinners of Sodom! As a decent person,
people being shot at and killed certainly
qualify as the needy in my book.
Bonnie Doran
Eugene
Pokémon Go players are privileged to
be able to block entire sidewalks and block
entrances and exits of downtown businesses,
many times stopping unexpectedly in
mid-stride in our excitement to catch that
rare Pokémon. Members of the unhoused
community are criminalized daily for doing
any of these things. PokGo players get
“excuse me,” while the unhoused get verbally
assaulted. We get to break the law just for fun,
while the unhoused are ticketed, arrested and
prosecuted for just trying to survive. We use
the streets of downtown as our “playground”
without consequence because we are holding
a smartphone. Not all of our community’s
citizens can afford this luxury.
We are as guilty as anyone else. We
want to recognize that privilege and call it
for what it is.
Crystal and Vickie Webb
Eugene
PRIVILEGED POKÉMON
GRIM STATISTICS
We were excited as anyone else at the
news of the release of Pokémon Go, and
we have enjoyed playing along with our
friends. As we walked downtown, we
took another look to see it from a different
angle. We saw groups of people filling
the area, with players congregating in
doorways and jaywalking across streets to
“catch ’em all.”
There has been outrage expressed
nationwide over the killing of young black
men by police. But Alex Kaye’s “Selective
Outrage” letter [July 14] misses the
elephant in the room.
There have been nearly 3,500 murders
in Chicago alone during the past nine years
and countless injuries from gun violence.
Both the perpetrators and victims have been
HOT AIR SOCIETY
A BAD BILL AND A CREDIBILITY PROBLEM
hen I was in the Oregon Legislature 20 years ago, I wrote an
“insider baseball” perspective for EW on how ideas become bills,
and how bills become laws. Out of office now for 12 years and
retired for a year, some bills still piss me off.
Gov. Kate Brown has a credibility problem now that she
can’t seem to shake. It’s like a zombie wolf. It was supposed to be a dead issue.
House Bill 4040 passed during the 2016 legislative session and was signed into law
by Brown over the objection of a majority of Oregon House and Senate Democrats,
one principled Democratic congressman and most Oregon animal rights advocates
and conservation groups.
Now, months later, the Oregon Court of Appeals and the Government Ethics
Commission weighed in, and so has our grumpy congressman.
Let’s recap our wolf’s weary wanderings. In 2015, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife
Commission removed the re-introduced gray wolf from the state’s endangered
species list even though it had already been hunted to extinction in the early 1900s.
Three conservation groups (Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity
and Oregon Wild) sued to stop the de-listing, calling it premature. Immediately
following the lawsuit, three Oregon legislators (Sal Esquivel, Greg Barreto and Brad
Witt) and the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association drafted HB 4040: a bill which made
the commission’s 2015 delisting decision a law, in order to block judicial review.
Esquivel, Barreto and Witt then lied to their colleagues during House debate over the
bill. They swore up and down that HB 4040 was not intended to impact any litigation
or request for review of the delisting. At the same time, when asked, Kate Brown said
her office was “neutral” on the bill. By the time it got to the Senate, everyone’s story
started to unravel, and the bill passed.
Many of us who were told about Kate’s “neutrality” on this issue assumed she
would veto HB 4040. But she didn’t. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed
a “notice of probable mootness” soon after HB 4040 was signed into law, prompting
the case’s dismissal on those grounds on April 22. The conservation groups appealed
that decision and additionally asked the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for
an investigation into the three legislators for knowingly misleading their colleagues
4
July 21, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
CRUEL WOOL
Regarding Darrell Olson’s July 14
response to my June 30 letter titled “Worthy
Sheep,” I am encouraged that your eyes
have been opened to the exploitation
and many cruelties involved in the wool
industry (and all animal agriculture, for
that matter). I truly wish you were correct
in portraying the Black Sheep Gathering as
having “nothing to do with ‘actual’ sheep”
and being nothing more than “a gathering
of people and includes music and food.”
However, if you check its website, you’ll
see that sheep, goats and alpacas are,
in fact, trucked to the venue and put on
display for several days. It’s just one more
bewildering, stressful experience that the
animals are forced to involuntarily endure
in unfamiliar surroundings.
The “gathering” lists a potluck dinner,
which includes lamb and goat flesh. The
website encourages participants to donate
their slaughtered animals for this dinner as
“an opportunity to promote your farm and
support the Gathering.”
“Promote” is the key word. As is the
case with pretty much any event that
involves farmed animals, or, as industry
labels them, “livestock” — a calculated
term used deliberately to desensitize
humans into regarding farmed animals as
nothing more than useful objects — it’s
ultimately about commerce. It’s about the
buying and selling of thinking, feeling
individuals, either for their “by-products”
or their actual bodies.
Barb Lomow
Eugene
BY TON Y CORCOR A N
Zombie Wolf
W
overwhelmingly black. This in a city with
some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.
Detroit isn’t far behind in the grim statistics.
So I have to ask, “where are the Black
Lives Matter protesters? Where are
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Where
is President Obama? Where are EW and
other left-leaning media?”
The inconvenient truth is that a young
black man is far, far more likely to be
killed by another young black man than
by police. But you don’t hear that from
the left. Nor much commentary about 75
percent of black children being born out
of wedlock and how that is an underlying
cause of the violence in our inner cities.
As Taylor Swift sang, “I’ve never heard
silence quite this loud.” It seems that
“black lives matter” only when a white
person, especially a white cop, kills a black
person, whether justifiably or not. Talk
about “selective outrage.”
All lives matter!
Jerry Ritter
Springfield
about the real intent of HB 4040.
This prompted Congressman Peter DeFazio to send Kate a June 9 letter that
accused the governor of contradictory statements about the bill. DeFazio said
Brown’s office advocated on behalf of the bill’s passage, at the same time that she
stated publicly she would not advocate for or against the bill.
The conservation groups pursued the “mootness” decision to the Court of Appeals
and argued that HB 4040 was an overreach by the Legislature into judicial matters and
therefore potentially unconstitutional.
Now, the two latest decisions issued this month move the case back to the courts
for review … and apparently allow public officials to continue lying to each other.
The Oregon Court of Appeals has decided to reconsider the lawsuit against the state.
In her decision, Judge Erika Hadlock wrote: “The issues presented by this judicial
review and by HB 4040 are complex matters of public importance … Without deciding
what, if any, effect HB 4040 has on this judicial review, the court determines that
the issues of possible mootness and the validity of HB 4040 are more appropriately
decided by a department of the court following full briefing.”
Then on July 1, the Government Ethics Commission ruled that the conduct of
the three legislators in deliberately lying about their intention with HB 4040 was
not technically “misconduct.” Generally, state ethics laws ban lobbyists and public
officials from knowingly providing false or misleading statements to other public
officials.
But the commission dismissed the complaints because lawmakers who lie to other
lawmakers can only be held accountable by other lawmakers.
Apparently, the Oregon Constitution “permits legislators to lie with impunity to
their colleagues,” a Cascadia Wildlands spokesperson said.
Esquivel and Barreto, the two Republicans, issued a press release afterwards
calling the complaint “frivolous.” Nowhere in the press release did they deny that
they lied! (Witt, the Democrat, remained silent.) Once again, Kate’s left with some
explaining to do.
And now it gets worse: Last week the U.S. House passed Congressman Greg
Walden’s bill to remove all protections for the gray wolf at the federal level. Walden
apparently flunked Conservation Biology 101, whose fundamental essence is that
populations of any species must not become fragmented or they will become extinct.
So the wolf lives … for now. Stay tuned.
Tony Corcoran is a retired state employee and former state senator.