Bee Opinionated: Homeless women + Gov. Newsom addresses ‘cruel’ DeSantis stunt + Elections
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Hi and hello from Robin Epley with The Bee Editorial Board.
Congratulations to our colleague Yousef Baig, who married his fiancee Des yesterday in the beautiful foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. We’re all so happy for you both!
While Yousef is off celebrating his nuptials, the rest of The Bee Ed Board is hard at work getting ready for another endorsement season. (I feel like it was just the other day that I was complaining about primaries… ah, how time flies.)
We’re keeping super busy with interviews and editorials, and have already begun to launch our updated endorsements and new endorsements for the propositions and elected positions. Check all of it out on The Bee’s special election page.
The highlight of the interviews this week, at least for me, was our interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom.
He spent an hour talking to McClatchy’s California editorial boards on Thursday about a number of wide-ranging issues, including the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, the Mosquito Fire, the future of solar panels and electric cars, and if he has any ambitions for a presidential run. He even called Florida Governor Ron DeSantis “America’s Chief Bully.”
“This is nothing more than a stunt, but it’s done with intention — cruel intention to humiliate and dehumanize,” Newsom said Thursday about DeSantis’ cruel stunt to fly two plane loads of Venezuelan migrants north to Martha’s Vineyard. “It’s disgraceful, it’s repugnant and, I would argue, it’s illegal.”
Broth Without Any Bread
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe…”
Considering the cost of housing in California, living in a shoe might be the only option for women, who we now know suffer in far greater numbers from homelessness and housing insecurity than men do — especially women of color and single moms.
A new study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute recently revealed just how much women disproportionately struggle with the rising cost of housing in our state:
““I think we’ve become kind of almost numb, kind of inured, to gender inequality — that in anything we look at, women are going to be worse off,” GEPI President Nancy Cohen said. “But let’s be clear: It’s not natural. It’s the result of historical and current discrimination bias and sexism, and particularly the legacy of historical discrimination.”
Hard Out Here
Metro Columnist Melinda Henneberger also tackled the subject of gender inequality in homelessness this week. She visited a homeless encampment known as “the snake pit” where homeless women have to fend off sexual assault on a regular basis.
“Most women on the street have been raped,” Catherine Moy, a city councilwoman in Fairfield, who ran a homeless shelter in Solano County, told Henneberger. “‘They end up taking meth to keep themselves awake at night’ to try and ward off more attacks.”
“The South Sudanese refugees in a camp in Uganda I’ve written about a couple of times were, without any exaggeration, better off materially than these Americans living two miles from the seat of power, such as it is, in the fifth-largest economy in the world,” Henneberger wrote.
Opinion of the Week
“Fortunately, the region’s voters have another option, and a better one, to succeed Tom McClintock, their longtime non-resident representative.” — From our editorial endorsement of Dr. Kermit Jones, who is running against Kevin Kiley in the race for the state’s 3rd Congressional District.
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.
With love,
Robin Epley
(P.S. Last week in my sign off, I meant to write “Sí se puede” but what I wrote instead was “Si se puede,” which means “If we can” — and I definitely think we can! My thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for catching that error.)
A previous version of this newsletter misstated the candidates for the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Kermit Jones is running against Kevin Kiley.
This story was originally published September 18, 2022 at 7:00 PM.
