THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND
By Betty Freauf
August 30, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
A guest opinion written August 30, 2000, to our local newspaper by a PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) activist and a teacher for 30 years entitled, “It’s Not 1957 Anymore, Folks” recently surfaced. Allow me to use some excerpts:
“Years ago, when I was 12 or so, my family lived on a dairy farm just outside of Falls City. We often held small family reunions with uncles and their wives and our many cousins…
“What I remember, also, is that we were moderately educated, healthy, white, straight and Christian. The adults held jobs in schools, grocery stores, ice cream plants and offices; these jobs were the topics of conversation. We never mentioned prejudice, health care, racism or sexism.
“Recently, my husband and I played host to many of those same relatives and their extended families as we reunited in our back yard in West Salem. What a difference 43 years have made. Of the 35 people who attended two have earned Ph.D.s, six have master’s degrees, three earned bachelor’s degrees, nine have two to four years of post-high school training, and six are retired. Five are Buddhists, one is African-American, one is Tibetan, one uses a wheelchair, one is mildly autistic, one is a blind, musically gifted savant, and four are gay. We discussed our jobs, our lives and our history, and came even closer together as a family. So now I ponder the thinking of the Lon Mabons and the Bill Sizemores of the world.”
Mabon and Sizemore are plebiscite-writing machines. Mabon has warned since the 80s about the dangers of giving the homosexuals the same rights of genuine minorities and Sizemore zeroes in on taxes and government workers. Both men are born-again believers and had initiatives on the November ballot.
This seemingly intellectual snob continued with condescending remarks about the “moderately educated.” Has she ever seen the thankless “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel that thousands must do to make her life easier and happier? “Maybe they (Mabon and Sizemore) live in a time-warp, when everyone was moderately educated, healthy, white, straight and Christian. But the rest of us have moved on. Our back yard was a microcosm of the real world, a world that invites and celebrates diversity, a world that offers opportunities for seriously ill women to become lawyers, autistics to work full time and live independently, and gays to just simply live.
“We are just folks, folks. We are the teachers, and the secretaries, and the bus drivers, and the construction workers in your town. We are your friends, your neighbors, and the family in front of you in church. Our society, yes, our families have advanced in structure and in thinking.
“So when November comes, let’s continue to allow our future generations to become well-educated, well-employed, well-cared-for, and well-accepted. Please vote with care on the issues this election. I don’t want to return to 1957, do you?”
In November 2000, Oregon had 26 initiatives on the ballot. Mabon’s measure would have prohibited public schools from instructing, encouraging, promoting or sanctioning homosexual, bisexual behaviors. It was defeated by 86,119 votes out of 1,491,263.
In a newspaper interview, Lon Mabon said his organization viewed homosexuality as a wrong sexual behavior that would be destructive to the individual and eventually destructive to society. In addition to newspaper editorials opposing Mabon’s initiative, several Human Rights Coalitions, ecumenical churches and faculties at some colleges opposed it. Goal #26 of the Communist takeover of America is to present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
I truly pity employees of the government school system who willingly exploit children for a paycheck. They don’t understand they are doing the devil’s bidding. This brainwashing used to begin in college but it now infiltrates into preschool where children barely out of diapers are indoctrinated that “Heather has Two Mommies.” The same crowd that is scaring our children with sky-is-falling type of environmentalism (more communism) is the same crowd that has given us high gas prices, forests that burn due to lack of proper management and budget crunches because future taxpayers have been killed in the womb.
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Would you like to return to 1957? A 40-something friend said “Yes,” with one exception. He wants to take his computer with him. Coach Dave Daubenmire’s article, “It’s For The Children” pretty much sums up problems that have accumulated ever so gradually, beginning with America’s worthless paper dollar.
In 1957 a week’s groceries cost $20, a new car cost $2,000, a small two-bedroom house cost $9,000, a pack of cigarettes cost 25 cents, postage was a nickle for a letter. Teenagers worked during the summer months earning money for school instead of goofing off at stores unsupervised, while mother works today to spoil them with electronic gadgets and expensive clothes. An occasional kid in those days had a ducktail haircut and some worried the next thing they would be wearing their hair as long as the girls.
Health care wasn’t a problem because everyone could afford the $10 doctor bill and carried inexpensive major medical insurance to cover the big stuff. The State of Oregon may very well have been the first state to offer a type of universal health care when our socialist Democrat governor John Kitzhaber, a medical doctor, got his Oregon Health Plan passed in 1994 – Oregon’s version of the federal Medicaid program. A few transsexuals complained the plan was discriminatory because it didn’t fund the $10,000 sex change surgery so in April 1998 a panel convened to discuss the matter. There were conflicting accounts of whether the surgery lessened the rate of suicides and depression and enhanced self-esteem and other factors, such as the ability to hold a job. Build the trough and they will come.
A June 30, 1999, Annual Financial Report showed an increase of $449 million, primarily due to phase-in and rising costs of the Oregon Health Plan. By 2000, the plan was facing a heavier load and increasing numbers of Oregonians were without insurance. In 2003, the U.S. House, controlled by the Republicans, insisted the plan be restructured from near extinction. One drunk and drug addict was eliminated because she fell behind in her $6 monthly premium. The plan was serving about 350,000 and by January 2000 when the legislature convened, the prognosis was grim. A .27 per pack cigarette tax was going towards the plan. In September 2000, Kitzhaber said the plan was in financial crisis. Tobacco revenue was falling. Fewer smokers meant $8 million less for the plan that covered a variety of health problems from sinful lifestyles. It was estimated early in 2005 that the plan would cover 8,150 abortions in the two-year budget period from June 30, 2005. In 1999, the GOP controlled the House of Representatives. A bill to prohibit placement of sex change operations on the list of health services covered under the Oregon Health Plan requested by a GOP legislator was in committee upon adjournment.
Prejudice and racism did not become a monumental problem until inalienable rights were replaced by certain groups demanding “special rights.” Women did not serve in the military on the frontlines. Sexism, domestic violence laws and restraining orders now out of control (1) causing righteous indignation for many men had not even been heard of in 1957. Working women stressed out on antidepressants, false accusations of child abuse, and children being placed in foster care on psychotropic drugs, can all be placed at the foot of the radical feminist movement and Oregon may have been a pacesetter. Communist goal #40: Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
An August 22, 1997, article said Oregon women set the political tone. In 1973, the Oregon legislature had eight Democrat female representatives and one Republican (Norma Paulus) and two Democrat senators who connived how to get their radical feminist and environmental legislation passed by convincing the male Democrat House Speaker to appoint them to the House Environmental Committee. This was the era of the Equal Rights Amendment so they would introduce their radical bill, pass it quickly out of that committee and then on the House floor, and they played the “victim” racket. Forgetting they’d taken a Constitutional oath, the fatuous men succumbed and the bills got passed quickly by the Senate and received the Republican governor and staunch environmentalist, Tom McCall’s signature.
So now the women across the country were looking to Oregon as a leader in cronyism feminist politics. Senator Betty Roberts later became a Supreme Court Judge. She was the first wife of the “godfather,” Democrat Senator Frank Roberts. Their daughter became Labor Commissioner. Frank’s second wife, Barbara Roberts, became Secretary of State and elected in 1990 as a one-term, lame duck governor. Odd woman out but well connected with the Democrat cronyism crowd, Republican Norma Paulus became Secretary of State and ran for Governor in 1986 but was defeated by our pedophile Democrat Governor. She was one of three women receiving national support from Feminist leaders. She also became Superintendent of Schools.
Paulus once claimed she had more guts than a burglar but her campaign staff kept her from answering any questions, like Obama’s staff protects him. While describing the Department of Human Resources, which she voted to create in 1973 as a Republican legislator, she said, “I concluded about eighteen years ago that we could put God herself at the head of the Department of Human Resources and she couldn’t get a handle on it." Although she’s been relegated to the back of the bus politically and placed in some insignificant position to guarantee her a fat PERS retirement, as late as October 2005, the media still had the old gal on the front page of the paper with the headline, “Women who blazed trails in politics to be honored.”
Radical feminists have decried the concept of the family asserting that the traditional (read Christian) family represents a dysfunctional family unit and I rather suspect the writer of the guest opinion would agree because she and her family have “moved on” from 1957, emphasizing a sadness for the rest of us left behind with our narrow politically incorrect value system.
In the 1985 Oregon legislative session came the attack on the Founding Fathers. Thirty words: No textbooks shall be used in the schools which speaks lightingly of the Founders of the Republic or of those who preserve the union or which belittles or undervalues their work (HB 2663) were removed from Oregon law. In the 1987 legislature they attempted to eliminate all references in the law to “men.” All gender references were to become “persons.” Next to go was Presidents Washington and Lincoln birthdays which morphed into President’s Day and then giving the “extra” birthday to Martin Luther King. As I write, the same Marxist crowd is endeavoring to change some old-time main drag street in Portland, Oregon, to Caesar Chavez.
Some parents in 1957 were afraid to allow their children to see movies because Clark Gable said "damn" in Gone With the Wind. We had no exorbitant space program that put a man on the moon and the “eye in the sky” (satellites) that can track every move we make. Sports enthusiasts were shocked when some baseball player signed a contract for $75,000. I was still typing Last Wills and Testaments without errors on a manual typewriter as a legal stenographer. And although a few married women were having to go to work then to make ends meet, today the feminists make a woman who chooses to stay home to raise her children feel inferior and children are taken from the breast and tossed into daycare and we wonder why so many of them turn out rebellious and alienated from their parents! For the first time in our nation’s history, single-adult households now outnumber traditional dad-and-mom families.
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Our music and our arts illustrate clearly how far we’ve fallen as a nation since 1957 while our deficit spending threatens our national survival. As presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Marxist Liberation Theology minister of 20 years said, “The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost.”
Footnotes:
1 - August 4, 2008 NEW AMERICAN p. 12
� 2008 Betty Freauf - All Rights Reserved
