Martin Luther on Pandemic Responsibilities

I find it really interesting that the majority of anti-mask and anti-vaccination activists are Republican who are vocally Christian. You’d think given the early years of Christianity when much of the Roman world was consumed in plague it was Christians who cared for the sick and dying such that their caring and sacrifice made many converts that such a tradition would be maintained today. Instead we see many behaving in an uncaring and frankly un-Christian manner flouting mask requirements and worse beating those seeking to care for their fellows by reminding everyone to wear masks in their places of business.

Martin Luther had a lot to say about how Christians should behave in the midst of a pandemic, as the Black Death, bubonic plague, swept through Wittenberg and much of Europe. Luther was asked one of his followers Reverend Doctor Johann Hess, pastor in the city of Breslau, about proper behavior for a Christian in response to the deadly plague. Luther wrote a multi-page pamphlet — “Whether One May Flee From A Deadly Plague” — in response.

Regarding the responsibility of public officials in time of such a crisis Luther wrote: Accordingly, all those in public office such as mayors, judges, and the like are under obligation to remain. This, too, is God’s word, which institutes secular authority and commands that town and country be ruled, protected, and preserved…

Luther’s view of the individual’s responsibility toward others was also quite clear, he wrote: It is not forbidden but rather commanded that by the sweat of our brow we should seek our daily food, clothing, and all we need and avoid destruction and disaster whenever we can, as long as we do so without detracting from our love and duty toward our neighbor. How much more appropriate it is therefore to seek to preserve life and avoid death if this can be done without harm to our neighbor. Anyone who does not do that for his neighbor, but forsakes him and leaves him to his misfortune, becomes a murderer in the sight of God.

Luther pulled no punches on the topic of “Disregarding Everything Which Might Counteract the Plague and Death” writing: They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so with-out medicines or our carefulness. This is not trusting God but tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health.

If one makes no use of intelligence or medicine when he could do so without detriment to his neighbor, such a person injures his body and must beware lest he become a suicide in God’s eyes.

Luther took a dim view of anyone who couldn’t be bothered to act in the best interest of the community likening not taking protective measures to safeguard one’s neighbors to letting a neighbor’s house burn without attempting to put out the fire. He considered it murder. I imagine he’d take the same dim view of today’s right-wingers who spread their anti-mask and anti-vaccine vitriol while simultaneously spreading COVID-19 and from time to time dying of it.

Texas Republicans Reward Snitches

As of September 1 women in Texas Republicans have essentially outlawed abortion in the state. SB8 makes it illegal to have an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy and since women are often unsure they’re pregnant before six weeks this bill essentially prohibits 85% of abortions in Texas. The five worst members of the Supreme Court of the United States, three of whom are Trump appointees, have refused to even delay the effect of the bill until it can be reviewed.

I am deeply angered that women in Texas are already suffering from losing the choice of whether or not to continue their pregnancy as I don’t see where any man has the right to control what a woman does with her body. There’s been a lot of discussion of that already and most Democrats are pro-choice so let’s put that part of this disturbing bill on the side and focus on another insidious effect of this bill.

Texas Republicans gave abortion opponents in Texas the right to sue women who seek abortions and anyone who provides assistance to them from the doctor or nurse, to the friend or family member who drives them to the clinic, or anyone who helps finance the cost of the procedure. Texas Republicans pushed this bill through the legislature over the objections of women of all ages and Democrats on both houses of the legislature. Those who snitch on their neighbors or co-workers are guaranteed a minimum of $10,000 from anyone they successfully accuse of having, providing, aiding or abetting an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. Given that there are typically at least three people involved in an abortion, the pregnant woman, a doctor, and a nurse the snitch stands to get at least $30,000 in rewards.

There is historical precedent for this Republican legislation going back to Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Russia. The Nazis rewarded snitches who turned in Jews or anyone who hid or helped Jews flee. In Soviet Russia snitches were rewarded for informing on anyone who opposed or criticized Stalin or his policies. In Stalin’s Russian no one could be trusted as even family and friends might turn on you at any moment. As you might imagine such snitching was often abused by jealous neighbors, spurned lovers, and others with a grudge. Sociologist Jan Gross refers to such snitching as a form of ‘privatisation’ of the totalitarian state, since they enabled individuals to draw on the state’s coercive power to settle private grievances. Texas Republicans seem to want to privatize everything else so add snitching as another means.

Reliance on snitching is something that totalitarian regimes are known for. I find it interesting that my conservative neighbors refer to many liberal policies as communist and something out of Soviet Russia yet it is their restrictive policies and practices like snitching that most resemble the totalitarian Soviet state.

According to Psychology Today the term projection “is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another. For example, if someone continuously bullies and ridicules a peer about his insecurities, the bully might be projecting his own struggle with self-esteem onto the other person.”

If conservatives quack like ducks maybe they are ducks, or in this case totalitarians.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - September 8, 2021

Gov. Abbott Willing to Sacrifice Our Children

Gov. Greg Abbott is doing his best to sacrifice the life of your child or grand-child. By issuing an order banning local governments from passing mask mandates Abbott has willfully chosen to sacrifice the lives and health of the children of this state. You may hear plenty of “its might right” talk coming from Republicans and especially Libertarians who don’t want to wear a mask in public but they’re wrong.

Isn't your right to drive drunk? Shouldn't parents be able to decide whether or not to use a car seat for infants and toddlers? Why can’t paint companies and gasoline refiners use lead in their products like they used to? The answer is public health; we all have a right to life and health that cannot be subordinated to the right of an individual to just do as they please. That’s why government must have the power to mandate public mask wearing and should use it at this critical time. In fact the U.S. Constitution makes that very point in the preamble which states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Here in Texas the weekly number of new, confirmed cases of COVID-19 is now greater than it was last year at this time. Hospital capacities in ICU’s all over the state are again near peak levels and deaths are again on the rise. As parents, children, and teachers prepare for the new school year its incumbent on school boards and administrations to look out for the best interests of those children. It’s important that they consider the best available information.

At the request of the North Carolina legislature Duke University researchers tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction.  The researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health wrote; "We have learned a few things for certain. Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection."

Dr. Benjamin stressed the efficacy of universal in-school masking in an interview with PBS News Hour stating "What we found was despite having extremely widespread COVID in the communities in North Carolina, if universal masking is in place, the chances of one child infecting another is less than 1 percent," he said. Voluntary masking, on the other hand, is about as useless as universal masking is effective. "Having a voluntary mask policy is like having a no-peeing section of a pool or a no-smoking section on an airplane," Dr. Benjamin explained. "That's absurd."

Given their constitutional duty to promote the general welfare, in this case public health, it is necessary for all levels of government to have the ability to impose mask mandates as appropriate in order to protect the lives and health of our children whether some parents are smart enough to understand that or not. Gov. Abbott’s presidential ambitions are insufficient cause to sacrifice our precious children’s health or lives.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 18, 2021

Gulf Stream Collapse Catastrophic

Last week climate scientists reported that the Gulf Stream has become unstable and is nearly total collapse. You might remember that the Gulf Stream is the ocean current that sends warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north up the east coast and across the northern Atlantic to western Europe which moderates the winters there. The Gulf Stream is a part of what scientists call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and it also sends cold but less salty water southward deep in the ocean. If this circulation of warm and cold water should fail as it appears ready to do it could threaten our entire civilization.

The AMOC affects the climate of the east coast of North America as well the coasts of northwestern Africa and Western Europe. Its failure would cause rising sea levels on the U.S. Atlantic coast, threatening numerous cities. That failure could also wreak havoc on the world’s food supply, due to its effect on rainfall from South America to India and West Africa. Just as concerning, would be the effect on the Antarctic ice sheets and the Amazon rainforest which are already in trouble.

Climate scientists aren’t ready to predict when such a catastrophe will occur just that we’re approaching a tipping point and they don’t know how much more it will take to get there.  Given the unknowns the only thing to do is keep CO2 emissions as low as possible in order to minimize overall climate change. Every little bit of CO2 added to the atmosphere further increases the likelihood of this extremely high-impact event occurring.

More than 30% of jobs in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are in agriculture; the way of life of these works revolves around fairly stable climate systems doing what they’re expected to do most of the time. Climate change tossing that out the window by amplifying existing weather patterns of dry spells, then heavy rainfall, then dry spells. Rainfall is becoming either increasingly abundant or in desperately short supply, relative to longtime averages. It’s a classic case of feast or famine and right now, rural farming families across Central America are starving. Some are even taking their families and leaving their homes. Not because they want to but because they have to in order to survive.

If you think immigration is a problem now, wait until severe drought conditions go on for decades in Central and South America as has happened in millennia past and brought down civilizations like the Maya and Aztecs. More than 140 million people across three regions of the world; Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, could be displaced by 2050 due to foreseeable climate impacts like sea-level rise, extreme heat, drought, and crop failures caused by changing farming conditions. That’s not counting those displaced by hurricanes and flooding.

One of the most important reasons I wanted to see Democrats return to the White House and control of Congress was the difference in climate policy between the two parties. I was thrilled when President Biden returned the U.S. to the Paris Climate Accord though I’m frustrated that congress still hasn’t enacted legislation and budgets to actually get moving on our commitments. The longer we wait the higher and steeper a hill we’ll have to climb to get the world out of trouble. It’s past time to act decisively.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 11, 2021

Anti-Vaxxers Threaten All

My 91 year old mother lived in a time when Diptheria and Pertussis were serious threats to the lives of children and upwards of 35% of children didn’t live to adulthood. When I was 5 years old, in 1964-65, a wave of Rubella swept the United States causing 11,000 babies to be born deaf, 3,500 born blind, and 1,800 born intellectually disabled along with 2,100 neonatal deaths. Texas public schools require that students are vaccinated at appropriate ages for Diptheria, Pertussis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Hepatitis A and B among other diseases. Today we rarely hear of children dying of any of these diseases and that is only because of vaccines.

Last week the San Antonio Express News reported that Bexar 55.53% of residents ages 12 and up had been vaccinated while the rate in Comal is 53.49%, Kendall is 55.73%, and sadly Guadalupe is only 47.6%. In Bexar County the positivity rate, meaning the number of people testing positive out of all COVID tests has doubled since the end of June and was 13.5% at the time the article was published. Hospitalization and ICU admissions are also increasing. 97% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the U.S. are unvaccinated, according to NPR. Numerous hospitals across the country have gone back to delaying elective procedures as they need the beds to treat COVID-19 patients.

COVID-19 is once again a major public health threat as hospitalizations rise and 83% of new cases are the highly contagious Delta variant yet our governor has stated he will not order a mask mandate. There is plenty of vaccine available and numerous convenient locations to get it as most local pharmacies are offering it but too many people reject the opportunity claiming they know better than the overwhelming majority of medical professionals. These are the same folks who refused to wear masks and claim that the 610,000+ deaths from COVID-19 are overstated.

I’ve lost patience with them, after all they’re mostly people who voted for Trump and continue to believe the election was stolen regardless of the lack of evidence. Early this year when we were under a mask mandate many of these irresponsible people refused to wear a mask or used material so thin that it was of no value and claimed that those who feared contracting the virus should just stay home. I take the opposite view, if they don’t want to wear a mask in public then they should be the ones who stay home and let the responsible folks take care of business in a safe, healthy environment.

I would accept their right to get very ill and perhaps die from a preventable illness  but the problem is having so many unvaccinated people in the community provides a pool for more variants to evolve in and threatens the lives of children under 12 who can’t yet be vaccinated and those with compromised immune systems like many cancer survivors. These folks are like Typhoid Mary and aren’t willing to accept their responsibility to the larger community in the name of some warped notion of personal freedom. To para-phrase an old quote: Your liberty to cough out a virus ends just where my nose begins.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 28, 2021

Fascism Comes to Texas

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as: a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. 77 years ago today American troops, perhaps your father or uncle, or grandfather among them, were fighting fascist forces not far from the Normandy beaches where they’d landed June 6^th. Today we’re still fighting against fascism.

One of the tactics of fascists the world over is claiming that something or someone is to blame and getting people angry about it, usually it’s a lie. Here in the US fascists are trying to persuade Americans to support them is through claiming that the 2020 election was fraught with massive voter fraud causing the 2 time popular vote loser and reality TV star to lose the election, it’s nothing more than “The Big Lie”. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered a $1 million reward and they still can’t provide proof of fraud 8 months later. A.G. Ken Paxton spent $1 million on staff salaries investigating voter fraud in the last year alone yet no one has been jailed. Those failures aren’t stopping them from taking actions to suppress voting rights under the guise of preventing that non-existent fraud. It’s all just Jim Crow 2.0.

Saturday morning the legislature held committee hearings on SB 1 and HB 3, both are highly complex, 40+ page bills which were only filed Thursday with over 200 other bills. Republicans are trying to give partisan poll watchers access to disrupt voting despite their notorious track record of intimidating voters of color. They’re also spreading fear to voters, election officials, and good samaritans to discourage their participation by further criminalizing Texas’s electoral process, targeting election officials in particular for minor mistakes. Republicans are gutting the ability of election officials to communicate with Texans about voting by mail. They’re making it substantially harder for Texans to access vote by mail applications and add new requirements for voter ID on a Vote by Mail ballot. Targeting voters with disabilities and forces those voters to disclose private medical information about one’s disability to access vote by mail.

The Republican written bills also eliminate pro voter policies that made voting safe and secure during the pandemic such as extended voting hours for shift workers and drive thru voting. The bills also authorize new lawsuits that can be brought by disgruntled losing candidates, in which a voter could be forced to disclose who they voted for - violating the very basic right to a private and secret ballot.

While the Republican authors have dropped provisions from the regular session that eliminated access to Souls to the Polls by restricting Sunday voting hours to the afternoon, a direct attack on traditional GOTV efforts in Black communities, that doesn’t mean they won’t try to add it back in the dark of night.

The courageous men who stormed the beaches at Normandy, fought through the bitter winter at the Battle of the Bulge, and marched into Germany and Italy to put an end to the fascist aggressors would be deeply disappointed if we roll over and let fascism take over the United States without even putting up a fight. Call Representative John Kuempel’s office, at 512-463-0602, and let him know what you think of these voter suppression bills HB 3 and SB 1.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 14, 2021

Texas' Senators Should Be Ashamed

Our two United States senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, shamed themselves last week by voting against even discussing S1, known as the “For the People Act”. The legislation would insure that all states offer early voting for at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections. The bill also requires that early voting locations be near public transportation, in rural areas and open for at least 10 hours per day. In other words our senators voted against requiring other states to offer similar voting opportunities to what Texas offers.

S1 also requires states to permit voters to register on the day of a federal election, including during early voting, something Texas doesn’t offer but is available in 18 other states plus Washington, D.C. States that allow citizens to register to vote closer to Election Day have higher participation rates. In Texas, at 30 days before election day; we have one of the earliest deadlines in the country, that's the earliest allowed by the National Voter Registration Act.

The “For the People Act” declares the right of citizens to vote in federal elections will not be denied because of a criminal conviction unless a citizen is serving a felony sentence in a correctional facility. The bill requires states and the federal government to notify individuals convicted of state or federal felonies, respectively, of the restoration of their voting rights. Texas offers a variation of this but voting rights aren’t restored until probation etc. is completed. Florida didn’t even offer that until recently when a citizen initiative passed overwhelmingly to restore voting rights then Republicans in the state legislature over-ruled the vote of the people to make it much harder for former convicts to again be able to vote.

S1 requires states to use individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballots and that those ballots are counted by hand or an optical character recognition device. Texas has no standard requirements on recording votes so Guadalupe and Kerr counties purchased machines that comply with this standard but neighboring Comal County spent millions of dollars on machines that don’t use voter-verified paper ballots. Republicans often talk big on election integrity but don’t walk the walk.

S1 prohibits a state from imposing restrictions on an individual’s ability to vote by mail. Texas already restricts vote by mail to voters over 65 and the disabled, in the last legislative session they tried to add a requirement that mail ballot voters provide proof of disability such as a doctor’s note and they’ll probably try again next week when the special session starts as voter suppression is one of the topics Gov. Abbott has called the session to address. 7 states, including heavily Republican Utah, offer all mail voting and people really like it. California also offers it as an option and last year over 85% of presidential election voters there used mail ballots.

S1 ensures equitable and efficient operation of polling places, reducing long lines and wait times for voters. In many areas of the country Republican election officials cause long lines and multi-hour wait times in minority voting precincts by providing too few voting machines while having an abundance in largely white precincts. Cornyn and Cruz voted against addressing this problem.

Our form of government works best when more people participate and feel like their voices are heard. Republicans apparently prefer low voter turnout believing that increases their chances of winning. The shameful behavior of senators Cornyn and Cruz is in line with Republicans across the south and especially here in Texas. They don’t care if government works as long as they retain power.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 30, 2021