THURSDAY, MAY 27, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
Back to
low risk,
for good
It was a belated move, but at least the Oregon
Health Authority dropped Baker County to the low-
est risk level for COVID-19 spread before the fi rst
holiday weekend of summer.
The change took effect today, May 27.
Restaurants, bars, theaters, museums and fi tness
centers can welcome customers up to 50% of capacity.
Baker County hadn’t been at the lowest risk level
since April 22. The county moved to the high risk
level on April 23, then to extreme risk on April 30.
The county returned to high risk on May 7 and
had been at that level until today, even though the
case rate subsequently has dropped to its lowest
level since October 2020.
The next milestone is likely to happen in less than
a month. Gov. Kate Brown said she will cancel re-
strictions statewide when 70% of Oregonians 18 and
older are at least partially vaccinated. As of Wednes-
day, May 26, that fi gure was at 64.4%.
Until the state reaches the 70% threshold, state of-
fi cials should keep Baker County at the lowest level
of restrictions, barring a major outbreak of the sort
that has yet to happen here during the pandemic.
Our business owners have suffered enough from
limitations that are not only stringent, but that have
at times changed every two weeks, making it diffi cult
if not impossible for owners to plan ahead.
It’s unconscionable for the state to continue to
punish businesses, with no evidence that they have
contributed to the spread of COVID-19, simply be-
cause the county’s test positivity rate slightly exceeds
an arbitrary level. The county could have dropped
to lowest risk May 21, but the positivity rate, due
solely to statistics from the fi rst week of May, was
8.9% over a two-week measuring period, above the
threshold of 8% to stay out of high risk.
During the most recent two-week measuring
period, the positivity rate was 3.6%, below the 5%
threshold for lowest risk status.
Baker County residents have made great progress
in curbing COVID-19 this month. We’re preparing
for a summer that should be much closer to normal
than 2020 was. Without a defensible reason, state of-
fi cials shouldn’t cast clouds over this bright prospect.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
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Your views
Don’t rewrite history based
on current standards
Is it 1984? Winston Smith, the
protagonist of George Orwell’s fi ctional
book, “1984,” about living in a socialist
society, works at the Ministry of Truth.
Ironically, he spends each day rewriting
history so that it agrees with the cur-
rent political ideas and propaganda.
Recently I read that some major
newspapers are rewriting or removing
previous articles if they refl ect nega-
tively on persons who are members of
minority groups. Since the electronic
fi les are changed, anyone conducting
research would fi nd a different version
of a story, or no story, compared to what
was published at the time of the event.
The stated purpose of this effort is to
protect minority persons from an im-
age of them participating in criminal or
negative activities. The motivation for
this change effort is the belief that mi-
nority persons were unfairly targeted
— i.e., that news articles were written
about them when a white person would
have escaped the notoriety.
I’m not a journalist. I don’t know
how they decide if a particular event
is newsworthy, or not, or how minority
status might come into play in that
decision. Certainly, everyone should
be treated fairly. But if history is be-
ing rewritten to comply with current
political ideas, it appears we might be
living in an Orwellian world. I’m very
concerned.
Jim Carnahan
Baker City
Reversing Roe v. Wade: wrong,
but it’s not anti-democratic
By Michael McGough
May 19 marked the fi rst meeting of a
commission appointed by President Joe
Biden to study possible changes to the
Supreme Court including an increase in
its size — aka “court-packing.”
But Demand Justice, a group that
advocates adding four justices to the
nine-member court, thinks that Demo-
crats can’t wait for the commission to
conclude its work before moving to ex-
pand the court. One reason for urgency,
it suggests, is the possibility that the
court might overrule Roe v. Wade, the
1973 decision that legalized abortion
nationwide.
That’s not a far-fetched fear. Last
week the justices announced that they
will review a Mississippi law that would
outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of
a pregnancy — a frontal assault on the
principle enunciated in Roe and later
cases that women have a right to abor-
tion before a fetus is viable.
It may make sense for advocates of
enlarging the court to add the threat
to Roe to their rhetorical arsenal. But
there’s also a risk of muddling their
message.
Until now, the most eloquent argu-
ments for enlarging the court have been
based on the idea that a conservative
Supreme Court is stifl ing democracy.
In April Washington Post columnist
E.J. Dionne wrote that court-packing
wouldn’t be on the table “if conserva-
tive justices had not substituted their
own political preferences for Congress’s
decisions, notably on voting rights and
campaign fi nance reform.”
Dionne also cited the Republican-
controlled Senate’s refusal to consider
President Barack Obama’s nomination
of Merrick Garland to the court. His
point about the court striking down
laws that promote political participa-
tion was especially potent, potentially
even for some Republicans.
But the claim that the court is
“anti-democratic” doesn’t mesh neatly
with the argument that it needs to be
expanded to preserve or reinstate Roe
v. Wade.
The democratic process has often
been the enemy of abortion rights.
In Roe and a companion case, Doe v.
Bolton, the court struck down restric-
tions on abortion enacted by the states
of Texas and Georgia. The Mississippi
law the court will review was approved
by the people’s representatives in their
wisdom (or folly) only three years ago.
And if Roe were overruled, “trigger”
laws in several states would make abor-
tion illegal.
There are compelling reasons to op-
pose a reversal of Roe v. Wade, begin-
ning with the argument that the court
was right to hold that a constitutional
right to privacy “is broad enough to
encompass a woman’s decision whether
or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
Additionally, overruling a precedent
almost half a century old would cause
what Chief Justice John G. Roberts
famously called a “jolt to the legal
system.” It also would upend the lives
of women who have organized their
lives in reliance on its protections, as
the court recognized when it reaffi rmed
the “essential holding” of Roe in its 1992
ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
None of the reasons for reaffi rm-
ing Roe, however, is primarily about
democracy.
In its response to the court taking
the Mississippi case, Demand Justice
said, “The Supreme Court is a looming
threat to our democracy and in urgent
need of reform.” Even if that’s true as
a general proposition, it’s an odd frame
for an argument about protecting Roe v.
Wade. Advocates of expanding the court
can argue that the current court is hos-
tile to abortion rights, but that doesn’t
mean it’s “anti-democratic.”
Michael McGough is the senior editorial
writer for the Los Angeles Times.
OTHER VIEWS
We must condemn surge in antisemitic attacks
Editorial from The Los Angeles
Times:
The recent military confrontation
between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas
militants spawned a regrettable yet pre-
dictable response: a surge in antisemitic
attacks. Yet we all know it doesn’t take
a fl ash of violence in the Middle East for
people to give free rein to their hatred.
Antisemitism courses through world cul-
tures, and world history, with a distressing
persistence, like a virus we can’t vanquish.
Over the last several weeks, vandals
have struck synagogues around the
country; a mob beat a Jewish man in New
York City near dueling protests by pro-
Palestinian and pro-Israel groups, while
other Jews have suffered random attacks;
epithets have been hurled in the streets
and social media sites have been fi lled
with antisemitic comments and memes;
and swastikas have been scrawled on
school walls.
California has seen its share, too. In the
most recent high-profi le incident, a Ban-
ning man was arrested late Friday after
Los Angeles police alleged that he was part
of a group of people who hurled antisemitic
remarks and scuffl ed with Jewish diners at
a West Hollywood sushi restaurant on May
18. More arrests, police say, are expected.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League
reported last month a 40% increase in
known antisemitic incidents in the state
from 2016 to 2020.
People sometimes excuse antisemitism
as a lesser outrage because of the unique
nature of the targets — people who are, for
the most part, white and often lead lives
of privilege, which can make it hard for
others to recognize them as a victimized
minority. But they have been just that sort
of minority historically, and they often are
in the present. Ethnic slurs and scuffl es
like those we’ve seen in recent weeks are
part of a continuum of hateful action that,
on the extreme end, leads to violent death.
Hyperbole? No. Deadly mass shootings
in recent years at synagogues in Poway
and Pittsburgh and a kosher deli in Jersey
City, N.J., were the peaks of sporadic acts
of violence against Jews that includes the
punching of a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn
last week by a man police say also tried
to torch a building housing a synagogue
and yeshiva, as well as the slashing attack
that wounded fi ve people at a Hanukkah
celebration in Rockland County, N.Y., two
years ago.
The most vexing aspect of such acts of
hatred is their persistence. Even bigots
have a right to their soapbox in this coun-
try, but we can counter their message by
better informing their potential audience.
Experts suggest that the best antidote to
racism is education, exposure and inclusion
— the more people see and understand
one another and their differences, the less
likely they are to act on their prejudices.
In truth, we can’t end antisemitism any
more than we can end anti-Black and
anti-Asian racism. But we all must work
harder to reduce it and to recognize that
society doesn’t function for all when so
many have to constantly look over their
shoulders.