VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, February 23, 2019
East Oregonian
A5
Putting ‘care’ back in health care
T
he recent marked shift in our local
weather pattern has coincided with
an unfortunate turn of events in
the health of several people with whom I
am closely associated. A couple of those
affected are my actual family members
while others, due to their long and val-
ued friendship, may as well be. All of the
aforementioned folks are (or soon will be)
faced with mobility issues.
Aside from a broken arm 30-some years
ago, there has not been a time in my mem-
ory when I was not able to climb a ladder
or drive a stick shift (well, OK, since I was
12 or 13 years of age, at least). I have been
lucky and feel truly blessed. Now, some
of the people I know who have not only
been able to negotiate a ladder or a clutch
pedal, but, in one instance, even fly a U.S.
Navy airplane, require assistance with
such seemingly mundane tasks as getting
dressed or eating a meal. A few days ago,
son Willie and I ventured out to the gro-
cery store via an unplowed country road
full of wind-blown snow and, not surpris-
ingly, quickly found ourselves stuck in a
snowdrift. Within 15 or so minutes, we had
shoveled our way out, chained up the rear
wheels and were once again on our way.
Odd as it may sound, I was happy to run a
“poor man’s backhoe” for awhile and felt
immediately guilty that I have taken for
granted that I can.
In the past week or so, I have spent
more time in hospitals or rehabilitation/
care facilities than I had for many years.
One immediate observation is the dou-
ble meaning that can be found in the term
health “care” providers. The professionals
I have observed of late are not only trained
experts in their field, be it administering
lifesaving treatment in the ER, operating
a CT scan or other high-tech equipment
or persevering through hours, days, and
months or years of physical therapy with
a patient; they also genuinely “care” about
the people they are treating and frequently
exhibit a level of combined personal and
professional concern (not to mention com-
passion and patience) that is eminently
laudable.
I consider myself to be sufficiently qual-
ified to roof a barn, set the point gap on
an antique tractor, or fill a barn loft full of
hay bales. Perhaps with an alternate path
of matriculation, I could have learned to
operate a CT scan. However, I will read-
ily admit that I likely do not possess the
capacity nor ability to help someone regain
the ability to walk again after a stroke
has left them partially paralyzed. That,
my friends, calls for an individual who
is not only uniquely qualified, but truly
exceptional.
As is the case so frequently in our time
spent on this third planet from the Sun,
for every action or event or crisis there is
likely a reaction or a counterbalance. For
our household, this meant a visit from an
uncle I had not seen in 20-odd years and
my kids had not met. We made arrange-
ments to pick him up at the airport and
hastily set up humble (to say the least)
sleeping accommodations in our basement.
During the course of his several days
here, we made numerous trips to visit our
temporarily (presumably) infirmed kin and
eagerly tracked his progress and discussed
his upcoming challenges. On a happier
note, we attended daughter Annie’s final
high school basketball game (an exciting
one), shared several lunches out and gen-
erally got caught up with family news of
the past two decades. We also discovered
that aside from being a heckuva nice guy,
he is also a decent antique farm equipment
mechanic who possesses encyclopedic
knowledge of movies, music and baseball.
We dropped him off at the airport with
a souvenir 1957 Milwaukee Braves sched-
ule (his favorite team as a kid) and prom-
ised not to wait another 20 years to see
each other.
M att W ood
FROM THE TRACTOR
Military action in Venezuela a step too far
W
hile facing sharp criticism
nationwide, including lawsuits
from 16 states, for declaring a
national emergency over money to build a
border wall, President Trump, of course,
spent Presidents Day in friendly territory:
He came to Miami-Dade and a packed
Florida International University arena to
show support for Venezuelans, but also
Cubans and Nicarguans who support his
administration’s efforts to apply more
political pressure to end the illegitimate
regime of Nicolás Maduro and throw sup-
port to Juan Guaido as the South Ameri-
can country’s interim leader.
Trump found a warm reception in the
city of refugees from dictatorships and
political unrest — and rightly so. Trump
deserves credit for being the only presi-
dent since Ronald Reagan to take a hard
stand against dictators in Latin America, a
region often forgotten by administrations.
But more important, Trump may have
given the thousands gathered a preview of
his 2020 re-election campaign battle cry.
Going after undocumented immigrants, as
he touted as a 2016 campaign promise, is a
perennial rant for the the president. So he’s
now targeting old-school socialism and
communism.
“America will never be a socialist
country,” Trump preached to the choir
highlighting the troubles that have plagued
Venezuela since it went down that road
under late leader Hugo Chávez.
Such statements hark back to America’s
past glories, much like Trump’s State of
the Union address where he made numer-
ous mentions of World War II. But Mon-
day, in the context of Venezuela, Trump
spoke directly to Maduro and his military.
The Trump administration is hoping to
step up international pressure on the dic-
tator, who’s blocking at the Colombia bor-
der millions of dollars in humanitarian
aid from entering his country. Sen Marco
Rubio, who has taken a leadership role
in the Venezuelan effort, and U.S. Rep.
Mario Diaz-Balart flew to the Colom-
bia-Venezuela border over the weekend to
attract international attention to the block-
aded food and medicine. Maduro is being
given until Saturday to allow the goods in.
The unspoken plan is that if the aid gets
in, the Venezuelan people, who are expe-
riencing tremendous shortages, may wel-
come it enough to turn on Maduro.
The Venezuelan military must now
turn its back on Maduro and allow aid to
enter Venezuela, the president, senator and
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis all said.
“You must not block this humanitar-
ian aid,” Trump said. “We seek a peace-
ful transition of power. But all options are
open. If you choose this path, you will find
no safe harbor, no easy exit and no way
out. You’ll lose everything.”
Such talk attracted opposing demon-
strators to FIU who demanded that the
United States keep out of Venezuela and
opposed any U.S. military action there.
U.S. military action is just the wrong,
and deadly, action to take when Venezue-
lans themselves already are taking matters
into their own hands — Guaido’s take-
over being the biggest first step. The U.S.’
unending thirst for oil must not supersede
Venezuelans’ desire to do for themselves.
Trump, so far, has deftly navigated our
involvement in Venezuela. He can con-
tinue to do so without the threat, or folly,
of military intrusion.
Rapists presented by their church as men of God
hen a journalist for the Illinois
Baptist newspaper reported in
2002 on a Baptist pastor who
had sexually assaulted two teenage girls
in his church, one apparently just 13 years
old, he received a furious reprimand.
Glenn L. Akins, then
running the Illinois
Baptist State Associa-
tion, offered a bizarre
objection: that writing
about one pastor who
committed sex crimes
was unfair because that
“ignores many oth-
N icholas
ers who have done the
K ristof
same thing.” Akins
COMMENT
cited “several other
prominent churches
where the same sort of sexual misconduct
has occurred recently in our state.”
In the end, the Baptists ousted the jour-
nalist, Michael W. Leathers, while the pas-
tor who had committed the crimes, Les-
lie Mason, received a seven-year prison
sentence and then, as a registered sex
offender, returned to the pulpit at a series
of Baptist churches nearby. So Leath-
ers is no longer a journalist, and Mason
remained a pastor.
That saga was cited in a searing inves-
tigation by the Houston Chronicle and the
San Antonio Express-News that found that
the Southern Baptist Convention repeat-
edly tolerated sexual assaults by clergy-
men and church volunteers. The Chronicle
found 380 credible cases of church leaders
and volunteers engaging in sexual miscon-
duct, with the victims sometimes shunned
by churches, urged to forgive abusers or
W
advised to get abortions.
cated, of course, for many of the Cath-
olic victims were boys, but there does
“Some victims as young as 3 were
seem to have been an element of elevat-
molested or raped inside pastors’ stud-
ies and Sunday school classrooms,” the
ing male clergy members on a pedestal
Chronicle reported.
in a way that made them omnipotent and
Leathers told me he is glad he wrote
unaccountable.
the 2002 article, even if it cost him his
“Underneath it all is this patriarchy that
career. He expressed frustration at South-
goes back millennia,” Serene Jones, the
ern Baptist priorities: The church leader-
president of Union Theological Seminary,
ship would expel a church that appointed
told me, noting the commonality of the
a woman as senior pastor, even as it
Catholic and Southern Baptist churches:
accepted sexual predators.
“They both have very masculine under-
standings of God and have a structure
The indifference to criminal behavior
where men are considered the closest rep-
is an echo of what has been unearthed in
resentatives of
the Roman Catho-
lic Church over the
God.”
“IF GOD IS MALE, THEN
decades. The latest
The paradox
sickening revela-
is that Jesus and
THE MALE IS GOD.”
tions are of priests
the early Chris-
tian church
— Mary Daly
getting away with
seem to have
raping nuns and
been very open
with assaulting deaf
to women. The only person in the New
students.
Testament who wins an argument with
These new scandals provoke fresh nau-
sea at the hypocrisy of religious blowhards
Jesus is an unnamed woman who begs
like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who
him to heal her daughter (Mark 7:24-30
thundered at the immorality of gay people
and Matthew 15:21-28).
even as their own Southern Baptist net-
The Gospel of Mary, a Gnostic text
work tolerated child rape.
from the early second century, sug-
gests that Jesus entrusted Mary Magda-
I suspect it’s no accident that these
lene to provide religious instruction to his
crimes emerged in denominations that do
disciples.
not ordain women and that relegate them
But then conventional hierarchies
to second-class status.
asserted themselves, and women were
“If God is male,” Mary Daly, the fem-
inist theologian, wrote, “then the male is
mostly barred from religious leadership.
God.”
After the Chronicle‘s investigation, the
The result may be threefold: an enti-
Southern Baptists have promised greater
tled male clergy, women and girls taught
training and more background checks, but
to be submissive in church, and a lack of
what’s needed above all is accountability
accountability and oversight. It’s compli-
and equality.
“Prohibiting women from the highest
ranks of formal leadership fosters a funda-
mentally toxic masculinity,” Jonathan L.
Walton, the Plummer professor of Chris-
tian morals at Harvard, told me.
Baptist women have been ready to be
heard for a century. I know because my
great-grandfather John Howard Shake-
speare was the leader of Baptists in Brit-
ain from 1898 to 1924 and practiced his
sermons on his wife. When she once
insisted that she had something else to do,
he locked her in an upstairs room.
My great-grandmother Amy, wearing a
long dress, then climbed out an upper win-
dow and onto a tree branch, and finally
clambered down the tree to the ground.
Perhaps inspired by such a strong
woman, Shakespeare favored the ordina-
tion of women. “That women are not yet
permitted to take their proper share in the
life and work of our churches is, to our
thinking, a relic of barbarism,” he wrote
in 1901.
So much has changed for women since
then, yet even today a majority of religious
women still belong to denominations
that do not ordain women. And as long
as inequality is baked into faith, as long
as “men of God” are unaccountable, then
sexual assaults will continue.
The problem is not just wayward pas-
tors and priests. Rather it is structural, an
inequality and masculine conception of
God that empowers rapists.
And, perhaps, embarrasses God.
———
Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the
New York Times, was raised on a sheep
farm near Yamhill, Oregon.
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
U.S. PRESIDENT
Donald Trump
The White House
Comments: 202-456-1111
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Washington, DC 20500
whitehouse.gov/contact/
U.S. SENATORS
Ron Wyden
221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510 • 202-224-5244
La Grande office: 541-962-7691
Jeff Merkley
313 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510 • 202-224-3753
Pendleton office: 541-278-1129
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE
Greg Walden
185 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515 • 202-225-6730
La Grande office: 541-624-2400