Moscow council deserves thanks

The following letter to the editor appleared on page 9A of the Moscow Pullman Daily News in Moscow, Idaho on December 27, 2007.

     I commend the Moscow City Council for extending insurance benefits to city employees' domestic partners, including same sex partners. I urge the Council to stand firm and if challenged to argue its case fervently.
     The instigators and defenders of the Idaho Constitutional amendment tabooing same sex marriages are trying to use it to impose their misguided rightist views far outside the question of who may have a legally recognized wedding. They hope to use the amendment to dictate what policies offered by an insurance company can be accepted by the city and its employees.
     No matter how broadly or narrowly it is interpreted, the anti gay marriage amendment is based on prejudice, is unjust, and is harmful to society. It is also a direct affront against freedom of religion. My UU church, the first to ordain women ministers and homosexual ministers, has long recognized and ritually blessed same sex marriages. By the principle of minority rights, no one, not even a majority of voters, has the right to use the law to forbid the practices of my church, so long as we do not impose on others or cause others harm.
     The government has no business interfering in anyone’s religion. From a religious perspective, a wedding is a sacred communal ceremony. The only question the government should have about a marriage is whether it is a valid civil contract agreed upon and adhered to by both parties. Who but the hard-hearted and uncharitable would deny two adult citizens the right to agree to a contract to live intimately together as equals, sharing all, mutually responsible for each other’s and any household children’s well being, on the basis of "to love and to cherish," whether they are of opposite sexes or of the same sex?

          Brian Leekley
         Moscow, Idaho

Single Payer Health Insurance

I submitted the letter below on September 10, 2007 to Moscow [Idaho]– Pullman [Washington] Daily News on September 10, 2007. I think they published it not long afterward.

Dear Editor,

     On September 8, one of your columnists suggested jocularly that the concept of buying and selling "carbon offsets" should be used to "offset" other guilty pleasures, such as smoking and gluttony. Coincidentally, the following evening I saw the movie Sicko, directed by Michael Moore, and learned that France has already put into practice a close cousin of that idea.
     Like most industrialized countries (ours being a backward exception), France has a single payer, government managed, tax supported,universal health care system. Doctors treat people according to their health care needs, without even asking about ability to pay. In the film Moore interviews a French doctor who drives a fancy car and lives in a posh house. The doctor explains that under the French system,doctors, as government employees, are paid amply enough to live comfortably. He goes on to say that his income was raised in recent years, because the more he showed that he was convincing his patients
to practice healthier living habits, such as quitting smoking or
lowering harmful cholesterol levels, the more the government increased his salary.
     Paying doctors more if they not only treat disease but promote healthy living habits is a beautiful and sensible idea, as universal health care is in general. In the examples looked at by Moore –– Canada,England, France, and Cuba –– everyone gets health care for free when needed, with the cost shared by the whole society through taxes,lowering overall health care costs and benefiting all. I've lived in Canada and can vouch that it works wonderfully.
     In contrast, Sicko exposes the USA’s degenerate and shameful health care and health insurance systems, in which the big bucks are made by dishonorably and dishonestly denying care to those who need it and who by our system’s own rules should get it.

CommUnity Walk in Moscow, Idaho 2007

I submitted this letter to the editor on April 30, 2007 to the Moscow–Pullman Daily News. I think they printed it soon after.

     CommUnity Walk Day in Moscow April 28 was a delight. I hope it was the first of countless years of an annual CommUnity Walk Day.
     The event – with politicians' speeches and young folks' essays praising the ideal of community, a walk, and feasting and live music in a park -- was in the ages-old tradition of town festivals to celebrate the end of winter and the coming of the season of first flowers, of tree buds and baby leaves, and of the planting of the crops. It seems fitting to sandwich May Day between CommUnity Walk and Renaissance Fair weekends.
     I've known other towns that have annual festivals whose origins no one remembers. One in Illinois had Jubilee Days, with an outdoor craft fair and an antique car parade. Another in Michigan had Food Fest, in which the town's restaurants set up booths in a city park and bands played bluegrass in the bandstand. Each of those special days started long ago, probably as the dream of one person, then of a few, then of many, and developed from dream to event to annual tradition.
     The manifest universe, including human society, is naturally contradictory. "We should change slower!" "We should change faster!" "It's us against them!" "We're OK; they're OK!" "Labor is a commodity!" "A laborer is a human being!" "Deregulate!" "Regulate!" "Hurray for the old ways!" "Hurray for the new ways!" "I'm average; you're odd!" "Wrong! I'm average; you're odd!" Such disagreements form the warp and woof of our civic lives. And it all happens within community. As Jesus taught, we're all neighbors.
     Democracy involves awareness that, among humans, a) dynamic contradictions are natural and b) happen within community. It's good to set aside a day to celebrate our common humanity and this, our community.

          Brian Leekley
          Moscow, Idaho