How churches influenced COVID + Placer drag queens + Woodland doctor’s mission in Ukraine
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Welcome back to another edition of The Sacramento Bee’s opinion newsletter, Bee Opinionated!
First, Happy Easter, Chag Sameach, Ramadan Mubarak and a very happy Vaisakhi to all who celebrate! (Opinion assistant Hannah Holzer has promised me some homemade kugel and I’m planning to hold her to that by mentioning it here.)
This week the opinion team was missing our fearless leader, Marcos Breton, while he was away on a well-earned vacation, but I think we managed to make him proud in his absence. We published a rather blasphemous column on the religious community’s role in supercharging the politics around COVID, a peek inside Placer County drag shows, and a humanitarian immigrant story — all on Easter Sunday.
The editorial board continued holding endorsement interviews last week, meeting with state legislative hopefuls and congressional candidates. California will begin mailing out ballots on May 9, so stay tuned for editorial endorsements and videos from each interview.
Call of Duty
Assistant opinion editor Yousef Baig recently spoke with Liana Turkot, a Woodland-based doctor who spent three weeks providing training and distributing medical supplies in Poland and Ukraine. Turkot said she saw herself in many of the refugees at the Polish border: She immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine as a 31-year-old widow with a 6-year-old son, and didn’t speak English.
Turkot and her son, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, helped transport vital surgical equipment and medical supplies to the Polish border and then across western Ukraine. Dignity Health in Woodland and Woodland Memorial Hospital donated most of the equipment but Turkot and her son also purchased some themselves, Baig found.
“I came to America with a child, and I know how difficult it is,” Turkot told him. “At that moment, those people were just happy that they left the country. But I know the hardship that is waiting for them. ...They are going to countries where they don’t know languages. They are going to countries where they won’t have their professions back, where they have to accept totally different work that they’re not even thinking they’re going to do.”
Placer County Realness Extravaganza
Placer County isn’t necessarily the first place I’d look for LGBTQ+ events in California, but Hannah Holzer captured the scene at a recent drag show in Loomis. Her column made it clear that the sold-out drag show the McLaughlin Theatre demonstrated the need to create and support a space for queer and transgender youth in an area so conservative that leaders refuse to fly the Pride flag. The show raised money for Camp Fruit Loop, a three-day summer camp for local LGBTQ youth.
“For queer people, family is more than just blood,” said performer, Iris Omega. “Family is the people that love you for who you are. That’s why we did the drag show, to say, ‘We’re here, we love you and we exist.’”
Playing With Fire
In an editorial this week, deputy opinion editor Josh Gohlke took on the outrageous settlement agreement between six county district attorneys and utility giant PG&E, which lets the investor-owned company escape without acknowledging any wrongdoing in its role starting the last year’s Dixie Fire and the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County.
From that editorial: “This settlement, by contrast, conforms to a broader pattern of unearned dispensation for a company that has proved it should not continue to exist in its current form. Prosecutors defended the settlement as yielding greater benefits than criminal fines, which are subject to legal limits. But prosecutors aren’t supposed to be bean counters: They’re elected to seek justice, not tribute. In this case, they have settled for the latter at the expense of the former.”
Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman jumped in with his hilarious rendition of the news, too.
Opinion of the Week
“Visit the infamous ‘hole in the ground’ today and you’ll see a bunch of weeds, cement blocks and a deteriorating fence. For nearly two decades, CalPERS has essentially left this toilet seat up for all of us to observe. — Jack Ohman, on the failure of California’s state worker retirement agency to do something — anything — with the infamous plot of undeveloped land at the top of the Capitol Mall in downtown Sacramento.
Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.
Here’s hoping you had a weekend filled with sunshine, candy eggs and drag queens.
Peace,
Robin Epley
