Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 20, 2015

Mountain Views News Saturday, June 20, 2015 
15OPINION Mountain Views News Saturday, June 20, 2015 
15OPINION 
Mountain 
Views 
News 
PUBLISHER/ EDITOR 
Susan Henderson 
CITY EDITOR 
Dean Lee 
EAST VALLEY EDITOR 
Joan Schmidt 
BUSINESS EDITOR 
LaQuetta Shamblee 
PRODUCTION 
Richard Garcia 
SALES 
Patricia Colonello 
626-355-2737 
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WEBMASTER 
John Aveny 
CONTRIBUTORS 
Chris Leclerc 
Bob Eklund 
Howard HaysPaul CarpenterKim Clymer-KelleyChristopher NyergesPeter Dills 
Dr. Tina Paul 
Rich Johnson 
Merri Jill Finstrom 
Lori KoopRev. James SnyderTina Paul 
Mary CarneyKatie HopkinsDeanne Davis 
Despina ArouzmanGreg WelbornRenee Quenell 
Ben Show 
Sean KaydenMarc Garlett 
Pat Birdsall (retired) 
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SUSAN Henderson 


TUESDAY WAS NOT A GOOD DAY IN 
AMERICA, WEDNESDAY WAS WORSE. AND 
TOMORROW ISN’T LOOK GOOD EITHER! 

TUESDAY: 

Donald 
Trump, in his 
announcement 
that he was 
seeking the 
nomination as 
the Republican 
Candidate for 
President said, 

“When Mexico 
sends its people, they’re not sending the 
best. They’re not sending you, they’re 
sending people that have lots of problems 
and they’re bringing those problems. 
They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringingcrime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, 
are good people, but I speak to border 
guards and they’re telling us what we’re 
getting.” 

WEDNESDAY: 21 year old Dylan Roof 
in the midst of a killing rampage that 
took the lives of 9 innocent people in 
church said of African Americans: “You 
rape our women and you’re taking over 
our country.”

 The week didn’t get any better. On 
THURSDAY, the landscape became even 
more polluted when NRA Board Member 
and Attorney Charles Cotton told the 
Associated Press what he posted on 
social media - that Pastor Pinckney, who 
was murdered in the church massacre, 
was to blame for the deaths because as 
an elected official he (Pinckney) blocked 
legislation that would have allowed the 
members of the church to carry their 
own guns. Cotton’s statement implied 
that if everyone had come to Prayer 
Meeting with their guns, they’d be alive 
today. Absolutely asinine. By the way, 
Pinckney, according to the AP, “……a 
search of legislative archives could not 
immediately find any such measure”.

 I don’t know about you, but for me, 
this week has been a national disaster. 
For me, it isn’t possible to just stick my 
head in the ground and ignore what is 
happening around us. It isn’t possible to 
watch powerful, self-serving egomaniacs 
make a mockery of the way we choose our 
leaders. It isn’t possible to listen to such 
a person, certainly not a man, although 
that is his stated gender identification, 
spew forth such ignorance and hatred 
by denigrating people based on their 
race. Ironically he chooses words that 
some could use to describe him and his 
business practices over the years. 

 It is also not possible for me to continue 
to ignore the proliferation of the kind of 

hateful rhetoric that the likes of the 
NRA’s Cotton uses in order to try to 
prove themselves right.

And, it isn’t possible for me not to 
notice that Roof, a 21 year old, has picked 
up some of the same hateful rhetoric and 
used it to justify killing innocent people 
who were worshipping in church.

 It is not possible for me to ignore it, and 
it shouldn’t be possible for you to ignore 
it either. Ignoring it just spreads the 
contagion like a virus, and makes life in 
these United States unsafe for everyone.

 The tragedy in Charleston goes beyond 
the death of the nine victims. It goes to 
the very core of what is wrong with our 
nation today. Where is our future headed 
when a mere 21 year old can be so full of 
hatred that he lost his humanity?

 Roof did not sink to that level of 
depravity without help. He is the product 
of his environment and that environment 
is not limited to his family. Our society 
bears a lot of the blame. This young man, 
who was allowed to guarantee his failure 
in life by dropping out of school in the 
9th grade, (no educational program to 
save him?) learned from the people and 
the world around him. 

 We tolerate a culture of fear and hatred. 
We tolerate a culture of oppression, a 
culture of instant gratification regardless 
of the damage caused. We waste time 
bickering over who is right and who is 
wrong rather than WHAT is right and 
wrong. We will not work together to 
identify and prioritize our problems 
and find solutions for them. Our 
priorities aren’t about preserving future 
generations. It has become all about 
what? I’m not certain.

 But I do know that we just keep on 
sticking our heads in the sand and the 
tragedies just keep coming. And, with 
each tragedy, we continue to skip right 
over the real problems and latch on to 
the sensational. 

 In President Obama’s remarks he said, 
“I’ve had to make statements like this too 
many times. Communities like this have 
had to endure tragedies like this too many 
times. 

 But let’s be clear: At some point, we as 
a country will have to reckon with the 
fact that this type of mass violence does 
not happen in other advanced countries. 
It doesn’t happen in other places with this 
kind of frequency. And it is in our power to 
do something about it.” 

No, this hasn’t been a good week for 
America. Question is, what are we going 
to do about it? 


In the wake 

of the Duggar 

molestation 

scandal and now 

the quirky case 
of Rachel Dolezal, one thing is clear: We 
as a public don't know what child abuse 
looks like. 

The CDC estimates that one in four 
American children experience some 
form of abuse and yet we're not quick to 
spot it or identify with it. Instead there's 
a tendency to be irked that "this stuff" 
is even being discussed publicly. Or as 
we've seen with the Duggars and the 
Dolezals, we default into our preexisting 
paradigms of partisanship: The Duggars 
are rightwingers and are typical of those 
people and Dolezal is a liberal Obama's 
America "transracial" fruitcake. 

But both these cases also feature fringe 
Christian movements protecting their 
ideals over their daughters. 

The saga of reality show subject Josh 
Duggar, who admittedly sexually abused 
five girls (four of whom were his own 
sisters), was a grotesque display of what 
religious zeal conditions people to be able 
to rationalize. "They didn't even know he 
had done it," said Michelle Duggar during 
the soft-focus Fox News Megyn Kelly 
interview. 

I've talked to sexual abuse victims who 
didn't realize what had happened to them 
until decades later. They had fears and 
phobias and things they just avoided, 
seemingly without reason—but they 
didn't put two and two together. So the 
idea of child abuse being contingent on 
the victim's memory, identification or 
understanding is just wrong. Being asleep, 
unconscious or blocking it out—doesn't 
make one not a victim. And it surely 
doesn't mean it didn't happen. 

Kelly, to her credit, repeatedly asked 
the Duggars about their daughters and 
they repeatedly answered by talking 
about their son, the abuser. To me it was 
Christian-based traditional gender-roleactivists valuing the man and his sexual 
proclivities over anything their own 
daughters might undergo. 

And another painfully public tale of 
throwing your daughter under the bus 
is Rachel Dolezal. While the national 
discourse instantly tee-heed and tsk-tsked 
at a white woman identifying herself as 
black, immediately branding her as a 
freak, a fraud and a phony—we all missed 
the real story. Why are her parents on 
TV at all? Their daughter wasn't hurting 
anyone. She had adopted a new persona. 
She had found another father who loves 

HOWARD Hays As I See It 


TINA Dupuy 
RACHEL DOLEZAL IS ACTING LIKE A 
CHILD ABUSE VICTIM ACTS 

her—a community who embraced her. 
She didn't get a salary from her position at 
her local chapter of the NAACP. She was 
fighting for the marginalized as an unpaid 
volunteer. She was trying to help people 
and further a cause of justice. Loving 
and compassionate parents don't go on 
media tours calling their daughter a liar 
and a disappointment—especially when, 
by every measure, she was successful and 
just living her life. 

Then it came out that this is yet another 
story hinging on child abuse. "Joshua 
Dolezal, 39, was charged in 2013 with four 
felony counts of sex abuse of a victim who 
was a minor at the time, sources and court 
records confirmed," reported the NY Daily 
News. Rachel is, of course, supporting the 
victim and that threatens these homeschooling 
young Earth fundamentalists. 
To them, if Rachel is a liar, everything can 
go back to the way it was. 

Rachel's birth parents are abusive. Two 
of the other children in the family (so 
far) have corroborated Rachel's claims of 
abuse: physical labor, forced isolation and 
physical violence. 

Rachel is acting like an abuse victim acts. 
She's estranged from her birth parents 
for a reason. And when she says she can't 
prove that Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal 
are really her parents, she's divorcing 
herself from them. She's trying to move on 
and move past them. I haven't called my 
neglectful and emotionally abusive birth 
parents "mom" and "dad" in over a decade. 
And if you ask me if they're my parents, 
I'll say no. I have parents; they didn't give 
birth to me. 

When Rachel says she identifies as a 
black woman and says she understands 
struggle, I think she does. Something 
about oppression resonates with her. Also, 
in seeing herself as black ,she becomes the 
opposite of the people who hurt her. She's 
running away from them—and she's told 
us why. 

Surviving is messy. It's complicated and 
it compels people to do seemingly absurd 
things. Some recreate their trauma by 
acquiring different abusers; some pass 
on their trauma by abusing others. Some 
hurt themselves, or in my case blame 
themselves. One became Oprah. And 
some vow to protect others—advocate 
for others—and dedicate their lives to 
helping others sporting a spray tan and 
a weave to tap into a culture noted for 
strength, endurance and triumph in the 
face of adversity. 

Tina Dupuy is a nationally syndicated op-ed 
columnist, tinadupuy@yahoo.com. 

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURNMICHAEL Reagan 
“Democrats’ obnoxious 
strategy to use women 
as political pawns was 
rejected in 2014 and will 
be again in 2016” 

-Andrea Bozek, 
spokeswoman for the 
National RepublicanSenatorial Committee 
Actually, it was 2012 

that saw popularization

of the “war on women” 

accusation against

Republicans. That was 

the year Rep. Todd 
Akin (R-MO), while campaigning for the Senate, 
explained how in becoming pregnant the body 
tries to “shut that whole thing down” in cases 
of “legitimate rape”. Also arguing against rape 
and incest exceptions for abortion bans, Richard 
Mourdock, Senate candidate from Indiana, 
suggested we instead just accept any resulting 
pregnancy as “something God had intended 
to happen”. Tom Smith, Senate candidate from 
Pennsylvania, characterized pregnancy from 
rape as simply an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. (All 
three lost their races.)

2012 saw strong opposition from Congressional 
Republicans to renewal of the Violence Against 
Women Act. In Wisconsin, current GOP 
presidential candidate Gov. Scott Walker saw to 
repeal of his state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, 
describing it as little more than a boon for trial 
lawyers and an attack on the “job creators”. In 
support, Republican State Sen. Glenn Grothman 
added, “You could argue that money is more 
important for men . . . maybe because they 
expect to be a bread-winner someday, may be a 
little more money-conscious”. (Grothman now 
serves in the U.S. Congress.)

The “war” became apparent in 2011, as the new 
Republican Congressional majority took over. 
They insisted the modifier “forcible” be included 
in legislation, so that an exception to the ban 
on abortion funding could not be made simply 
for “rape” – it had to be “forcible rape”. Further 
clarifications protected doctors and hospitals 
that not only refused to perform abortions 
themselves, but refused to arrange patient 
transfers to facilities that did, even in emergency 
situations where the life of the mother was at 
stake. Rep. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) said such 
legislation showed a “heinous disregard for the 
health and well-being of women in America.”

Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) that year introduced 
legislation to promote contraception for 
wild horses, while at the same time he and 
his colleagues tried to deny it for women by 
eliminating funding for Title X, the federal 
family planning program for humans. On the 
state level, a Republican legislator tried to change 
Georgia’s criminal codes so that a rape “victim” 
would henceforth be referred to as the “accuser”. 

We’re now seeing consequences of these 
actions. Two months ago, Indiana Republican 
Gov. Mike Pence instituted an emergency 
needle-exchange program to combat an 
unprecedented HIV outbreak in the rural parts 
of his state, caused by intravenous drug use. A 
few years earlier, Republican funding cuts forced 
the closure of five rural Planned Parenthood 
clinics in the areas hardest hit. None provided 
abortions; all provided HIV testing. 

As Gov. Pence was taking these emergency 
actions, the legislature in Texas, a state with 
the third-highest HIV infection rate in the 
country, was passing a measure to transfer $3 
million in funding from HIV/STD prevention 
over to programs promoting abstinence-only 
sex education. When the sponsor was asked how 
much more funding would have to be taken from 
these other programs, he answered as much as it 
takes for as long as people continue having sex 
before marriage.

The Texas Health and Human Services 
Commission estimated the state’s closing of 
Planned Parenthood and other facilities a few 
years ago would bring 23,760 additional births 
to low-income families over 2014-2015, at an 
additional cost to taxpayers of $273 million in 
Medicaid and other medical expenses.

This past week, House Republicans again 
passed a budget eliminating funds for Title 
X, which for over forty years has been helping 
provide millions of low-income Americans 
contraceptive care, sexually-transmitted disease 
screening, AIDS / HIV testing, cervical cancer 
screenings, etc. (Title X has never been involved 
with abortions.) Along with Title X, they’re 
targeting sex education programs and teen 
pregnancy prevention. Even after the Supreme 
Court’s “Hobby Lobby” decision, they want to 
make it easier still for employers to dictate what 
is covered under their female employees’ health 
plans.

House Republicans have passed these cuts 
before – but now it’s not so clear whether they 
can be stopped in the Senate as they’ve been 
in the past with the Senate under Democratic 
control. 

25% of the 4.7 million served by Title X 
are here in California. According to Julie 
Rabinovitz, President of the California Family 
Health Council, the program helps prevent 1.2 
unintended pregnancies in the state every year. 
There’s also $7 taxpayers’ money saved for every 
$1 spent on family planning.
The concern of Republican spokeswoman 
Andrea Bozek, quoted above, seems to be over 
how Democrats’ exploitation of such issues 
might affect next year’s campaigns. The concern 
for most of us, though, is how these real issues 
affect real Americans and real families today. 
As Cecile Richards, president of Planned 
Parenthood Action Fund puts it, “If Republican 
leaders in Congress think they can take away 
millions of women’s access to health care and 
shut down programs that are reducing teen 
pregnancy without one hell of a fight, they have 
another thing coming.”

In 1967, Rep. George H.W. Bush (R-TX) urged 
federal agencies to “work even more closely with 
going private agencies like Planned Parenthood” 
to achieve universal access to family planning. 
A year before signing Title X into law in 1970, 
President Nixon wrote, “It is my view that no 
American woman should be denied access 
to family planning assistance because of her 
economic condition.” 

Forty years ago, issues such as women’s health, 
family planning and preventing teen pregnancy 
didn’t seem to be partisan issues to fight about. 
When Republicans take party-line actions 
stripping these programs and protections from 
those who need them most, however, they should 
be neither surprised nor offended to see them reemerge 
as campaign issues in 2016. 

DONALD TRUMP'S 
CIRCUS ACT 

Poor Jeb. 

He's Donald Trump's first Republican 
victim, but he won't be his last. 

On Monday Bush officially declared 
he was a Republican candidate for 
president, something everyone knew 
was coming. 

Jeb gave a serious, by-the-book 
announcement speech, explaining 
his many qualifications, making his 
claim that he's a true conservative 
and promising to make America 
great again. 

It was boringly Bush, and maybe 
a little too moderate for hardline 
conservatives. But it was mature and 
dignified. Presidential even. 

The mainstream media gave Jeb 
token coverage for about a day. Some 
were especially impressed by his 
fluency in Spanish. 

But then on Tuesday the one-man, 
one-ring, Donald Trump circus 
rolled into Republican town. 

The Donald wasted no time proving 
to everyone why he should not be 
president. He also proved why he's 
going to spell trouble for the GOP 
primary process. 

Winging it without a written speech 
or a Teleprompter, Trump mangled 
lots of facts about the economy, 
attacked Republicans Jeb and Marco 
Rubio, offended the Mexican nation 
and admitted proudly that he was 
absurdly rich and ready to spend 
millions electing himself. 

Entertaining and scary at the same 
time, Trump was a speeding political 
train wreck before he got a chance to 
leave the station. 

He said horrible and untrue things 
about illegal Mexican immigrants, 
saying they were mostly criminals 
and murderers while admitting only 
"some of them may be good people." 

Yet Trump surely hit some nerves 
when he said we've become a country 
of losers because our leaders are 
a bunch of losers who can't get it 
right in Iraq, Iran, Washington or 
anywhere else. 

And who's going to argue with the 
Donald when he says the Chinese are 
winning every trade deal we make 
with them? Or that we're stuck with 
crumbling Third World airports like 
LAX and LaGuardia. 
It was Trump in all his self-powered 
glory. 

The media began bashing and 
mocking him immediately, mainly by 
merely repeating some of the dumb 
or outlandish things he blurted. 

Trump is not 
the Ross Perot 
of 2016. Perot 
was a serious 
businessman 
who wanted to 
fix the economy 
and balance the 
federal budget. 


Trump is a vanity candidate. He's 
also the wild-and-crazy GOP guy the 
liberal media have been praying for. 

Jon Stewart — whose progressive 
shtick on the "Daily Show" usually 
reflects the worst ideas and values of 
the Democrat faithful — thanked the 
heavens for Trump's decision to run. 

The Donald is a gift that will keep 
Hollywood's comedy sector supplied 
with a steady stream of material 
guaranteed to get laughs and always 
reflect poorly on Republicans. 

Another thing. When Trump's on 
the stage, he becomes the center of 
attention and sucks the air out of 
the room with his wild and crazy 
personality. 

Trump might actually possess some 
right answers for dealing with the 
legacy of problems the Obama gang 
will leave behind. 

But he will not be able to get anything 
done because to fix things in 
government, you have to know how 
to work with other people. 

Trump doesn't. He's a solo act, an 
ego in chief, an order-giving business 
exec. He isn't used to negotiating or 
working with others. 

Everyone knows Trump can't win. 
He knows it too. He's a dangerous 
distraction and a stain on the GOP 
brand, but conservatives stuck with 
him. 

For him the 2016 GOP primary 
is just another TV reality show. 
But this time it's a show with real 
consequences, domestically and 
internationally. 

He'll create lots of late-night laughs. 
He might even force substantive 
candidates to address important 
subjects they'd prefer to dodge, like 
immigration reform. 

But as long as Trump's in the race, he 
can only hurt the Republican cause, 
whether it's by making the party's 
primary process look like a clown 
convention or bumping someone 
smart and fiery like Carly Fiorina off 
the TV debate stage. 

The Donald and his multi-billions 
have crashed the GOP's exclusive 
2016 party for now. But in the long 
run, he'll be the joker who'll be 
trumped. 

Michael Reagan is the son of President 
Ronald Reagan, Follow @reaganworld on 
Twitter.