Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 26
A stand for dignity on public beaches
Changing part of Mpls. Park Board ordinance on nudity would restore gender equity.
The move this month by a panel of the Minneapolis Park Board to relax its rules around proper attire seems a modest blow for fairness and gender equality. The existing ordinance is simply indefensible in its discriminatory treatment of women’s bodies.
We’re not talking about public nudity at Minneapolis beaches. Women and men alike must wear bottoms, however brief. Above that bit of below-the-belt gender neutrality comes an exercise in legal hairsplitting that robs the human form of whatever dignity it may possess.
Let the Minneapolis Park Board’s current ordinance speak for itself:
“No person ten (10) years of age or older shall intentionally expose his or her own genitals, pubic area, buttocks or female breast below the top of the areola, with less than a fully opaque covering in or upon any park or parkway.”
A litigant might be able to challenge that ordinance simply on the grounds that, without the requisite comma after “covering,” it is the park and parkway that need to be opaquely covered, not the person ten (10) years of age or older. No matter. Errant commas have proved their capacity for mischief in the Second Amendment. It’s the assault on human dignity that concerns us here.
There is something needlessly clinical in the ordinance’s recitation of what Monty Python referred to as the naughty bits. It would be one thing to require that female breasts be covered, or even to stipulate that the covering include the nipples. But to specify the areola as the event horizon - as the Rubicon that must not be crossed - seems like an indecency all its own.
So does law enforcement’s decision to deploy surveillance drones to uphold the ordinance, as Golden Valley police did on a recent 85-degree Friday. When confronted with the tactic July 10 on a beach at Theodore Wirth Park, an outraged sunbather segued seamlessly from denial to accusation: “There’s drones? Are you SPYING on us?!”
The little triangles of cloth with which the suspects protested their innocence seem like arbitrary, even flimsy, defense, but they are enough for an arbitrary, even flimsy, regulation. We’d rather not descend to this level of argument, but here it is: Women have nipples; men have nipples. Women have areolas; men have areolas. Women have breasts; many men have them, too.
To say that men’s chests are acceptable in a way that women’s are not is an offense to logic, to equality and to the idea that government should leave people, as much as possible, to their own sense of right and wrong.
Again: We are calling not for public nudity, but for public equality. Why not begin with a pilot project? The Park Board could designate certain beaches as topless/optional and others as family friendly, meaning that tops must be worn (except in the truly family friendly cases of nursing mothers).
Here are two predictions: In the first couple of seasons, it will be difficult to find a parking spot near the topless/optional beaches; and before long, the difference will seem unimportant.
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The Free Press of Mankato, July 26
Bonding: House GOP failed outstate projects
Why it matters: Minnesota infrastructure projects have been delayed for three years now.
If you’re waiting for a new water treatment plant in your small town, you’ll have to wait longer. If you’re waiting for repairs to a leaky roof at your local community college, you’ll have to wait longer.
In Mankato, if you were hoping for funding to stop the main source of drinking water from being overwhelmed by flooding on the Minnesota River, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
If you’re wondering why these projects are not happening, ask House GOP Minority Leader Kurt Daudt and your local GOP legislators who voted against bonding in a political effort to get Gov. Tim Walz to relinquish some of his constitutionally granted emergency powers.
The House vote was 75-57, six votes short of the super majority needed.
Even other Republicans in the Senate couldn’t swallow Daudt’s strategy. They mostly supported a bill that included $1.35 billion in general obligation bonds, $300 million in trunk highway bonds and $147 million in appropriation bonds, including $100 million for affordable housing.
Walz himself detailed his numerous compromise offers to Daudt in a letter issued Tuesday. Walz noted in the letter that he was willing to relinquish some, but not all, of his emergency powers. That apparently wasn’t good enough for Daudt, who seems bent on playing out a political narrative that put politics ahead of the needs of Minnesotans.
While it’s said compromise falls to both parties, 90 percent of the blame for the bonding bill’s failure should fall to House Republicans, who include Rep. Jeremy Munson of Lake Crystal, Rep. Paul Torkelson of Hanska and Rep. John Petersburg of Waseca.
The bill contained $15 million for flood hazard mitigation money for Waseca and Owatonna in Petersburg’s district.
Other local projects that will not happen anytime soon in Munson’s district include $8 million for the city of Vernon Center to renovate its water tower, replace its wastewater plant and improve its sewer system and $900,000 for the city of Waldorf to continue its water treatment plant improvements.
The bill also included $300,000 for the German Park Amphitheater in New Ulm, where Torkelson is the representative.
Munson said he didn’t vote for the bill because it included provisions for using the Health Care Access Fund that he believes would have raised health care premiums for private insurance. Torkelson pointed to what he said were “poison pill” provisions put in by Democrats that he said funded “expensive” commuter trains and transit.
We challenge these representatives to make those arguments to their constituents. Bonding bills are compromises, and there will always be projects some don’t like.
Now, for the second year in a row, there is no bonding bill.
And now it appears there will be no chance for a bonding bill when the governor calls another special session because it will be at the same time other general obligation bonds are being sold. Financial experts say such actions rattle markets in the middle of a bond sale.
So Minnesotans, especially those in outstate, who have been waiting years for their projects will likely have to wait longer. And the project costs will grow.
The one solution Minnesotans have at their disposal to get their projects done would be to remove the remaining obstacles to bonding - those members of the House GOP minority who would rather vote politics than projects.
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Minnesota Daily, July 24
Know thine enemy
COVID-19 is insidious. Be aware of what does and doesn’t protect you.
Our nationally dismal response to the novel coronavirus pandemic has been the cherry on top of the Trump administration’s tenure to date. The administration and certain states in the Union have been testing the limits of Murphy’s Law with their pandemic responses, or lack thereof. And as we all know, Murphy is winning. As a nation undergoing a pandemic, we’re showing a tendency not to be able to think more than a few weeks in advance. But, unfortunately, no one’s wishful thinking changes reality. There are a few things that everyone should generally know about the pandemic just to keep everyone with maybe a toe on the ground of reality.
Acting like the virus doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t matter makes it all much more fatal, because it’s a domino effect. When we pretend that the virus doesn’t merit these highly disruptive precautions, then we carry on as if life is normal, which makes us spread the virus faster and to more people, which gives it exponentially more chances to mutate, which makes it both harder to vaccinate against and, in its own right, a stronger virus.
It might be important to concur with some communities that the changes to our daily lives are, indeed, inconvenient and annoying. It is disruptive that we can’t have parties or barhop or have normal school and work. It’s disruptive that masks are now a regular part of life. But, we love our first-world problems because we’re lucky to be in this world. By vilifying this astoundingly easy measure, we keep pouring gasoline on the fire in our own house.
Masks may sound unbelievable. It feels like finding out that even though we built a spaceship to fly to the moon, the actual only way to get there is to take the stairs. That’s crazy - something as untechnical as stairs can get us to this cosmic thing? Well, turns out the moon, or a full pandemic recovery, are heaven, and Led Zeppelin was right. Masks actually do stop the particles that we send flying through the air when we talk, and the virus that rides them. We’re Minnesotans, so we should know exactly how far our breath goes when we breathe because we watch it outside from late October to mid-April.
Some more general knowledge that everyone should know is that antibody tests are often highly unreliable, and even if we do have those antibodies in our systems, they may recede within three months. About 40% of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic, so plenty of us are in the dark about what we have now or had before. This truly is a James Bond villain of a virus. Too bad the President is nothing like James Bond. (Though they both have property in Scotland, Daniel Craig wouldn’t use his staff to wheedle the British Open onto his, much less during the onslaught of the action of the catastrophe du jour.)
Antibody tests aren’t a silver bullet, and the window of time in which they can convey any useful information is slim. An antibody test sounds useful to tell whether you’ve had it, therefore you theoretically won’t contract it again. However, some antibody tests work best 2-3 weeks after the onset of the virus and stop conveying useful information around 5 weeks later. And, there is no reason to believe that the presence of antibodies protects us from reinfection of the virus. The World Health Organization has found no evidence to support the presumption of immunity after contracting the virus the first time.
Contracting the virus must be even easier to do if we keep spreading the virus and letting it mutate. Even if you catch COVID-19 once and recover, then antibodies that may or may not continue to reside in your system may not protect you from a new strain of the virus; so you can catch it again, and the risks are all the higher since you have been compromised before.
We also see debilitating effects across the country in people who have survived the virus but now have to live with the lifelong consequences. Those people are just as important as the people who get it and move on like it was a slight cold. This novel coronavirus is unpredictable and inconsistent - it’s a wild card, and thankfully, there is one real method to stop it in real time. But, sadly, our Macho, Macho Men think masks are weakness. (We are sure the Village People themselves would not.)
We continue to be a laughingstock to the rest of the world. There are too many reasons to list, but not least is our rampant abuse of the WHO in the midst of the greatest health crisis in the last hundred years. We don’t need to be like this. We can think critically. We should save our own lives.
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