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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
September/October 2006
DOLORES HUERTA, co-founder with the late Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers Union, and other feminist leaders convinced the California Labor Federation at its 2006 biennial convention, held in late July, to reverse its past neutrality on abortion. The federation, part of the national AFL-CIO, had heretofore held to the national group's 1990 policy that states, that while union members "resent and resist government intrusion into matters that are essentially private," as far as abortion goes, the AFL-CIO yields "to the good and sound judgment of union members.... Sincere and dedicated trade unionists can be found on both sides of these issues." But at its biennial convention, Huerta, members of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and members of the Feminist Majority Foundation, rallied pro-abortion unionists to convince the California Labor Federation's executive council to reverse its "no recommendation" to a "vote no" position on Proposition 85, the November ballot initiative that would require doctors to notify parents before their minor children can undergo an abortion.
"I am a mother of 11 children -- by choice," Huerta told federation leaders, according to the August 7 Los Angeles Times. The federation's leadership had initially voted 13-11 for neutrality on Proposition 85, but strong debate at the convention induced the leadership to call for a voice vote, which, according to the Times, was overwhelmingly in favor of the "vote no" recommendation. In a policy statement, the California federation called on the national AFL-CIO "to reconsider its position of neutrality on the issue" of abortion.
The California vote does not directly affect the policies of the AFL-CIO. A spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. told the Mission that "each of the individual state offices have the option of making their own endorsements and choices." But state office endorsements do not dictate the policies of the state federation's over 1,100 affiliated unions. Some of these unions, in particular those representing janitors and building trades, said they would remain neutral on Proposition 85.
But what of the United Farm Workers, a union known for its use of Catholic imagery in demonstrations and friendship with the Catholic hierarchy? "We have not taken a position" on Proposition 85, United Farmer Workers' spokesman, Mark Grossman, told the Mission. "We have members on both sides of the issue, and others who are still struggling with their position."
According to Grossman, the United Farm Workers has in the past taken no position on abortion. "It does not come up a lot with us," he said. Grossman added that the United Farm Workers, while "affiliated with the state AFL-CIO," has "not been participating in the federation since last year, when the UFW joined the new Change to Win Federation."
But it was Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers co-founder, who pushed for the California Labor Federation's change of policy. Does this not implicate the United Farm Workers? "We respect Dolores' position, she has every right to take whatever stance she thinks is necessary," said Grossman. "But she has been retired from the UFW for several years."
Whether the California Labor Federation's opposition to Proposition 85 will have any effect on its chances in November, it appears it will change nothing in the federation's relations with Catholic leaders. Tom Tamberg, spokesman for the Los Angeles archdiocese, told the Times that the federation's vote was "disappointing." But, he said, "it would be unrealistic to expect every group to believe the same way we do about every issue. It doesn't preclude us from working together on those areas where we do share common concerns."
PREGNANCY COUNSELING CENTERS often give out false and misleading information about the health risks involved in abortion, said a report issued by Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives' government reform committee in July. The report was the result of a study commissioned by Representative Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) in which congressional aides, pretending to be 17-year-old women, called 25 pro-life pregnancy counseling centers that receive some federal aid for teaching abstinence. According to a summary of the report, the pregnancy counseling centers contacted "provided false and misleading information about a link between abortion and breast cancer," abortion's "effect of abortion on future fertility," and its effects on mental health.
The report claimed that "there is a medical consensus that induced abortion does not cause an increased risk of breast cancer. " It claimed that "abortions in the first trimester, using the most common abortion procedure, do not pose an increased risk of infertility." And, the report claimed, "research shows that significant psychological stress after an abortion is no more common than after birth."
"Pregnant teenagers and women turn to federally-funded pregnancy resource centers for advice and counseling at a difficult time in their lives," the report concluded. "These centers, however, frequently fail to provide medically accurate information." This is a "tactic," said the report, that "may be effective in frightening pregnant teenagers and women and discouraging abortion. But it denies the teenagers and women vital health information, prevents them from making an informed decision, and is not an accepted public health practice."
AMONG THE PREGNANCY COUNSELING CENTERS investigated were some associated with the Virginia-based CareNet, which includes over 2,000 centers under its umbrella, according to CareNet's spokeswoman, Kristin Hansen. Hansen denied that the threats posed by abortion to a woman's physical and mental health are chimerical. The problem, she told the Mission in July, is that there are conflicting studies. "Unfortunately the abortion issue has become so politicized that no one knows now who to trust on some of these very important issues," she said. "The thousands of women who are choosing abortion every day -- are they getting the right facts about the potential risks and do we trust Congressman Waxman, a pro-choice congressman who has released a number of reports attacking pregnancy centers, attacking the abstinence movement, and is an advocate for the abortion industry? Do we trust the National Cancer Institute? Do we trust pregnancy centers? Who do we trust? I think that [Waxman's] attack really is a wake-up call to America, that women, especially the young women who are getting abortions, deserve top-notch comprehensive research."
The abortion-breast cancer link, said Hansen, is probably the most debated of issues surrounding abortion. And while she admitted that not every woman will suffer this effect and others, they are nevertheless real. Several state governments, she pointed out, have recognized the risks and have mandated "informed consent laws" that require a woman be informed of the risks before she decides on an abortion. "Many of these states include the fact that there are varying opinions on the abortion-breast cancer link," said Hansen. "More studies need to be done on the issue."
At the CareNet centers, said Hansen, "any information that is distributed must be reviewed by a medical doctor. And we are in many ways committed not to exaggerate the risk but to give medically accurate information. Our centers are part of a hotline network called the Option Line; to participate, centers have to agree to a commitment of care [that] basically says, 'as part of this network, we are committed to being truthful."
Hansen admitted that, despite guidelines, neither CareNet nor the other similar umbrella organizations can control every volunteer or staff member in every center. "It is a very difficult volunteer position in that you are dealing with individuals with a host of crises in their lives, and so you're constantly retraining volunteers and keeping up on current research."
Gerry Urrutia, a sidewalk counselor with the pro-life Shield of Roses group in Los Angeles, wondered why Waxman is so worried about the nation's pregnancy counseling centers, which receive only a trickle of federal money, but not Planned Parenthood, which receives $250 million a year in federal funding. "When you go to an abortion facility, they tell you nothing can happen to you. Nothing?" said Urrutia. "You have your teeth cleaned and something can happen to you."
THE REV. RICHARD MCBRIEN, writing in the July 14 Tidings (the newspaper of the Los Angeles archdiocese), voiced his displeasure at the changes to the translation of the Mass in English approved by the United States bishops at their June meeting in Los Angeles. The changes -- "and also with you" becoming "and with your spirit," "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you" becoming "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof," for example -- "although small in themselves," wrote McBrien, "signify a major and decisive turning point in the so-called 'liturgy wars' that have been waged" since the Second Vatican Council.
McBrien complained that "a relatively small group of Catholics, including some high-ranking prelates, never accepted the ritual and linguistic changes in the Mass nor the conciliar ecclesiology on which they were based." One of these prelates was, presumably, Pope John Paul II, under whose rule "the advocates of a so-called 'reform of the reform' gained a sympathetic champion in the papal office," according to McBrien. In particular, the document Liturgian Authenticam, issued under the very un-Vatican II John Paul, which called for accurate translations of the Mass from the Latin, "was a complete reversal of what had been initiated by Vatican II and explicitly approved and supported by Pope Paul VI and the contemporary heads of the same Congregation for Divine Worship," said McBrien.
One might place Helen Hitchcock, editor of the liturgical journal, Adoremus, in the number of that "relatively small group of Catholics" who allegedly hijacked the Vatican with their "reform of the reform." But Hitchcock seemed a little nonplussed at McBrien's martial metaphor, "liturgy wars." "I would probably just say there has been a conflict over the liturgy," she told the Mission in late July. "It's fairly well known that the cause of the conflict," she continued, "is a serious divergence in interpretation about what the council did." It was not a radical rupture with the past, said Hitchcock. And "it's not some tiny little group called the Reform of the Reform [that has wrested control of the liturgy]; that's ridiculous. There is a growing recognition of the need to go back to the council documents to see what they said. This is necessarily causing distress."
The course of events that ran from the council through Pope John Paul II's Vicesimus Quintus Annus of 1988, to Liturgiam Authenticam in 2001 has been a continuum, not revolution/counter-revolution. "If you read what Paul VI was writing at the time about what was going on in the liturgy, you can find any number of interventions that the pope made officially -- letters to congregations, letters saying we're getting off-track, the liturgy is not something that we make up, the experimentation has been radical, etc. I think Father McBrien may be unaware of some things."
THINGS ARE BETTER. To Hitchcock, who attended this June's bishops meeting in Los Angeles, it is "quite clear that a majority of the bishops now want to have things better. It is better, but still we have serious pockets of dissent even in the leadership of the Church, and that's a problem that the present pope knows only too well."
Hitchcock said she had heard that a few bishops at the Los Angeles meeting wanted to delay a vote on the new translation; but, "in the end, some of them who maybe had no great enthusiasm for it maybe voted for it because it was inevitable. Cardinal Francis Arinze [head of Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments] wrote to the bishops just a few weeks before the meeting, saying that it was not within the power of the congregation to approve any text that was not in accordance with Liturgiam Authenticam. That may have helped the decision a bishop might make who was influenced from both sides."
The situation vis-à-vis the liturgy in the American Church "is a complete reverse of the situation we saw ten years ago, when the then-'progressive juggernaut' seemed to be unstoppable," said Hitchcock. "The Holy See properly became involved, noticing what was going on with these English translations, and its proper that they did so. English is an international language, functioning as Latin did in the early centuries."
SOUTH CENTRAL FARM IS NO MORE. Los Angeles County sheriffs' deputies on June 13 cleared a 14-acre site at 41st Street and Alameda that has been used as a community farm. (See, "We Have to Throw Them Off," April 2006 Mission.) About 40 protestors, protecting what in the community has been called the South Central Farm, were arrested. Bulldozers subsequently cleared the land, destroying the garden plots built up over 14 years. In the late 1980s, the city of Los Angeles bought the 14-acre plot for nearly $5 million from nine private owners, including Ralph Horowitz of the then-Alameda-Barbara Investment Company, to use as a trash incinerator. Because of community protests, however, the incinerator was never built; instead, in 1992, the city turned the property over to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to use a community garden. But Horowitz wanted the land; and when the city would not sell the land back to him, he sued. The city and Horowitz settled the case out of court, agreeing to a purchase price of $5,050,000 in 2002. The city council in closed session agreed to the sale the following year.
The farmers of South Central Farm, however, organized and challenged the sale in superior court. They lost both there and in appeals court. Still, the Farmers refused to leave the land, which resulted in a standoff that lasted until the spring of this year. Though Horowitz said he would sell the land to the farmers for $16.35 million, and by June the farmers had been able to come up with the money -- $6 million from an anonymous source and $10 million from the Annanberg Foundation -- Horowitz rejected the offer. "If the farmers got a donation and said, 'we got $50 million, would you sell it to us?' I would say no. Not a chance," Horowitz told the June 14 Los Angeles Times. "It's not about the money."
WHAT, THEN, WAS IT ABOUT? Ralph Horowitz claimed that the South Central Farmers were behind the distribution of printouts from a Spanish language internet site that claimed Horowitz was part of the "Jewish Mafia." The April 13 printout read, "not many people are aware that Los Angeles has a powerful 'Jewish Mafia' that is in cahoots with the Los Angeles Police Department and many local elected politicians." It called Horowitz a "sinister Jewish land developer." After the farmers had been squatting on his land for three years, without rent, said Horowitz, the anti-Semitic printout was too much. Farmers' spokesman, Fernando Flores, however, told the Mission in July that his group did not condone the printout. "We never tolerated any racism -- and we can't. Our group of supporters is diverse." Many groups, religious and otherwise, as well as individuals had stood with the farmers, including a local Catholic church, Santo Niño de Atocha, which offered the demonstrators room and board. ("We tried to reach out to Mahony and some of the other leaders," said Flores, "but all of [the Catholic support] has been local.") The source of the printout was a group called La Voz de Aztlan, said Flores, which provided a link to the South Central Farmers' website but was not part of the Farmers' coalition.
Protests at the farm site, however, continued into July -- while the South Central Farmers tried once again to fight the sale to Horowitz in court. On July 5, ten protestors were arrested; one man had chained himself to a bulldozer while another had lain down in front of it. A group of five men and three women were arrested for jumping the chain link fence and for stuffing an 18-inch zucchini into the bulldozer's exhaust pipe, temporarily disabling it. These eight were charged with felony vandalism. Earlier, in June, protestors reportedly called out obscenities in Spanish, English, and various Indian languages at law enforcement, according to reports. Flores had no comment on these events, merely saying, "there were a lot of people here during those days."
In court, the Farmers' argued that the land had been resold to Horowitz "under property value," which "challenged the merit of the sale," said Flores. "It was illegal. The city is supposed to sell for fair market value. This is an issue of past history with the city selling land below the value of it." But while the farmers' attorneys presented evidence that the land's value ranged from $8 million to $13 million, superior court judge Helen Bendix thought their figures were "not credible," saying the land's value at the time of sale was only $6 million.
The farmers have said they will fight on, though what they can continue to do is unclear. As for the farm, "it's destroyed," said Flores in July. "There are two trees standing, a black walnut and a couple of smaller trees. If you come down now, you can smell all the rotting vegetables."
THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE is warning non-profits to keep their noses clean this election year -- to avoid "improper campaigning" forbidden them by IRS regulations. In 2005, the national taxing agency came down on All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, accusing it of engaging in forbidden political speech when a minister, the Rev. George Regas, during the 2004 election criticized both George W. Bush and John Kerry for their positions and actions in regard to the Iraq War. The IRS said it was investigating the church's tax-exempt status, which it could lose if the agency decided the minister had stepped over the line. In February 2006 and then again in June, the IRS announced a new enforcement program, the Political Activity Compliance Initiative, in which it said it will not wait for an non-profit's annual tax return before it investigates it for wrongful campaigning. A three-member panel will then investigate allegations and vote on whether to pursue a more detailed review.
The IRS' investigation of All Saints prompted Democratic U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (Pasadena) to ask the agency in November 2005 for an explanation. When he received no response, Schiff, with Congressmen Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) and Joseph Pitts (R-Pennsylvania), requested that the Government Accounting Office investigate the IRS for possible violations of clergies' First Amendment Right of free speech. Finally, last spring, the Government Accounting Office told the congressmen that it was not going to pursue the investigation, recommending that they contact the Treasury Inspector General. According to a source in Washington, D.C., the accounting office told Schiff that since he, Jones, and Pitts were not ranking members of a committee or subcommittee, it was not required to accede to their request for an investigation.
In August, Schiff and Jones wrote a letter to the secretary of the treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, which was first circulated among members of Congress. The letter noted two other IRS investigations of non-profits -- one, where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was investigated for criticizing the Bush administration's "civil rights agenda," and another where the First Baptist Church of Springdale was investigated following a Fourth of July sermon given by the Church's pastor that noted his support for the Administration's positions on marriage and abortion." The letter asks the IRS to "clarify its rules on political intervention so that tax-exempt organizations know what is and is not allowed."
Schiff and Jones' letter addresses a February 2006 IRS report defending the "fairness and impartiality" of the policies by which it investigates non-profits. In this report, the taxing agency claimed that 75 percent of its completed investigations of non-profits showed that they had engaged in some kind of forbidden political speech. "However, earlier this month, an advocacy group, OMB Watch, released its own report that found that the earlier IRS report exaggerated the extent of noncompliance," said the letter. "The OMB Watch report showed that the IRS claims of violation were based only on cases not dismissed after two rounds of investigations and that no violation was found in nearly two-thirds -- 64 percent -- of all completed investigations."
The congressmen ask the IRS to "address the disparities" between its own and the OMB Watch report. "The actions of the IRS in this matter will have a potentially chilling impact on protected First Amendment rights," the letter said.
COMPANIES THAT EDIT HOLLYWOOD MOVIES to make them "family friendly" violate copyright laws, a U.S. district court judge ruled in early July. Film studios such as Walt Disney, MGM, Warner, Sony, and Dreamworks joined some of Hollywood's big name directors in bringing suit against companies such as the Utah-based CleanFlicks, which have engaged in third-party editing of films to remove objectionable scenes depicting sex and violence. Denver, Colorado district judge Richard Matsch ruled in favor of the studios and directors, writing that "their objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movie." Matsch gave four of the larger distributors five days to destroy their inventory of edited movies. CleanFlicks' chief executive Ray Lines told Associated Press that he would appeal the ruling, saying, "we're going to continue to fight." In August, however, the CleanFlicks web site was holding a going-out-of-business sale.
"The issue" of third party editing of movies "is something very important to families who want to protect their children and themselves from material they find offensive," Tim Winter, executive director of the Parents Television Council in Los Angeles, told the Mission. Winter said he found "two key takeaways from the court's ruling. One," he said, "is that it still protects some technologies [such as offered by ClearPlay] which allow a family to edit movies for themselves, though you cannot resell." But for Winter, the second and broader issue is "that the decision exposes the entertainment industry and shows how self-serving their cries about free speech and First Amendment rights are when it comes to the indecency debate. If they really cared about the First Amendment, if they really cared about the right to speak freely, they would have no problem whatsoever with companies like those the court ruled against. If they truly believed in free speech, they would be flattered that families would have an opportunity to see their work when, otherwise, they might not be able to. It's all about their wallet. And, ironically, they're actually losing profit and revenue through this ruling. People that would be otherwise paying for the right to see their work now are not."
But what of Justice Matsch's decisions? Is the editing of films a violation of copyright law. "It certainly seems to be," Winter said. "The only difference here is that [the studios and directors] were being paid for their work. If someone took a motion picture I made, altered it and resold it, I would still be getting the same royalties as I would if they just bought the original. Based on that, I don't see where's the harm. Where's the damage? The damage is clearly not economic; the damage is, 'well, gee, that's not my vision. If I have a credit on there as being the creator, don' t change it and credit it to me."
SUICIDE BILL IS NOT DEAD. A bill that would legalize physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients was rejected 2-2 by the state senate judiciary committee on June 27. Committee members opposed to the bill were Republican Senator Tom Harman (Huntington Beach) and Democratic Senator Joe Dunn (Santa Ana). Democrats Martha Escutia (Whittier) and Sheila Kuehl (Santa Monica) supported the bill. The fifth member, Senator Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside), who was not present, was known to oppose the bill.
News reports indicated that the bill's co-sponsors, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys) and Assemblywoman Patty Berg (D-Eureka), would reintroduce the suicide bill next year. However, Levine spokesman Alex Traverso did not promise this when he spoke to the Mission in June. But, "Assemblymember Levine remains committed to the effort," he said.
"I think at this point the polls show the majority of Californians are in favor of end-of-life choices for terminally ill Californians," said Traverso. (According to a February 2005 Field Poll, 70 percent of Californians support the proposition that "incurably ill patients have the right to ask for and get life-ending medication.") "Obviously, drumming up support in the legislature is something different altogether. Will it come up again this year? Probably not. Will it be back next year? He and Assemblymember Berg are mulling over their options at this point. Because we have an election in November, a lot of people we had on our side are going to be gone and a lot of new members will be coming in. So, it's a matter of going through and re-educating people to all the finer points of the issue. Are both of them up for that challenge? At this point, yeah, that's something they're still discussing."
Traverso, however, said it was "tough to say" whether Levin and Berg will champion suicide "through a bill next year, which will be introduced. There are other ways that he [Levine] can still support the issue," said Traverso. Did he mean a ballot measure? "That's something that is discussed by the different groups, like the Compassionate Choices people," said Traverso; "but that would require a lot of money being raised to out-raise the opponents, which are the Catholic Church and the pro-life people that have a lot of money to spend. That's something that Lloyd's considered also, but there's challenges either way." (A ballot measure calling for the legalization of assisted suicide failed in 1992.)
Does the assemblyman fear a gubernatorial veto of his bill if Schwarzenegger is re-elected? Traverso expressed hope that Arnie would have changed his mind if the bill successfully made its way through both the assembly and the senate. Schwarzenegger's words were "very careful" when he commented on the bill this year, said Traverso. "He said that he preferred it to be something that is left to the people. I think there has been some change of direction in people he's brought onto his staff. After [the governor] met with some people who lobbied on behalf of the bill, they came away with sort of a good feeling about his stance on the measure. I think that that if they were to take on the bill next year and go full out with the same level of energy that we had in the campaign this year, and the bill got to the governor's desk, I think our chances wouldn't be bad at all."
A BILL THAT WOULD REQUIRE state textbooks to carry information about "homosexual roles and contributions" to California and the United States benefited from a special rule waiver in the state assembly, charged state senator Ray Haynes in June. SB 1437, ("School Instruction; prohibition of discriminatory conduct") is a bill sponsored by openly lesbian state senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). The bill, passed by the senate in May, went on to the assembly, where it was "double referred to assembly education and judish" [sic, assembly education and judiciary committees], said a spokesman for Senator Kuehl. "There was a hearing scheduled for the 20th," he continued, "and the hearing was put over, at the request of the consultant, to the 27th. And then, at that point, the [judiciary] committee decided to waive jurisdiction of the bill."
It was the judiciary committee's waiver of jurisdiction -- that is, its decision not to review the bill -- that bothered Senator Haynes. According to the California Political Review's June 29 "Capitol Watch," "GOP Assemblyman Ray Haynes charged Democrats with twisting long-established procedure to force through an unpopular bill in a high-handed maneuver no Republican measure would ever be given. 'How unusual is this?' Haynes asked. 'It has never happened before in my entire 14 years in the Legislature.'"
Senator Haynes did not respond to the Mission's request for further comment. But Kuehl's representative (who said that he could only "provide background and stuff," but could not speak for Sheila Kuehl), said such a waiver of jurisdiction by a committee "happens all the time." He said he understood the objection -- "I saw the floor discussion of the motion that was referring the bill to the floor, and I know that some of the Republican members were displeased about [the waiver]; but it's not an uncommon thing."