Bee Opinionated: America’s weight bias + Gun laws fail victims + UC benefits from Big Oil
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Hello hello, this is Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, tuning in again to bring you the latest and greatest in the week’s California opinion journalism.
Last week, I wrote about an issue close to my own heart, after a Sacramento firefighter and EMT, Timothy John Keyes was caught following his posting a long diatribe on Facebook in 2020 about how he has “killed” fat people by making them walk to a gurney while they are dying from congestive heart failure.
“Presented with a person far too heavy to lift safely, a person dying of any overworked heart (congestive heart failure) and KNOWING ‘better,’ I will opt to NOT have my crew lift him,” Keyes wrote, and said that he has “killed more people this way than in any other.”
Keyes’ comments are reflective of the kind of discriminatory attitudes held by too many medical professionals, and many overweight people have often experienced. Doctors show strong anti-fat bias in health care situations, according to Harvard Medical School.
This bias results in reduced quality of care, and “the subsequent negative health outcomes are a result of what they call chronic social stress, and studies have found the harmful effects of weight discrimination resulted in a 60% increased risk of death.”
In the past decade, weight discrimination around the world has increased by 66 percent, and is one of the only forms of discrimination actively condoned by society.
“Decades of research have shown that experiencing weight stigma increases one’s risk for diabetes, heart disease, discrimination, bullying, eating disorders, sedentariness, lifelong discomfort in one’s body and even early death,” wrote Amanda Montgomery, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, in a study for the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health.
What Keyes said isn’t necessarily the problem, I wrote. It’s that so many people see nothing wrong with it.
It’s Always Been The Guns
In 2020, Christy Camara lost her 10-year-old son to a murder-suicide committed by the boy’s father in the town of Hanford, south of Fresno. Under a temporary restraining order she was granted by a judge just weeks before, the boy’s father should have never been able to obtain a gun.
Camara is now suing the California Department of Justice, which she says is withholding vital records that would detail the breakdown in orders that allowed her ex-husband to illegally purchase and then use a handgun to kill himself and their son, Wyland.
“There’s an overwhelming amount of research that shows the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation only increases the likelihood of death. California cannot pride itself on gun control laws and common sense firearm legislation if those systems and laws fail to protect victims in their most dire moments of need,” wrote The Sacramento Bee in an editorial this past week. “These safeguards must not only be put in place, they must work every time, without fail. Even one delayed or ignored order can result in deadly consequences. A judge’s order is a paper-thin wall of protection against a bullet.”
In a study of women in 67 California domestic violence shelters, nearly one-third of study participants reported their abusive partners using handguns to harm, threaten or scare them, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
California’s gun control laws can only be an example to the rest of the nation if they actually work. Not only must we pass the laws, wrote the board, we must also implement them.
“If the system did work, then Wyland would still be alive — along with hundreds of other domestic violence victims whom California and the Justice Department have already failed.”
Like Oil And Water
A new report from Data for Progress and Fossil Free Research identified UC Berkeley as the largest recipient of fossil fuel money among 27 academic institutions; the list also includes Harvard, MIT and George Washington University.
According to the report, UC Berkeley alone accepted a total of $154,302,577 of research funds from 2010-20 originating from the companies such as BP, Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Koch Industries.
“As the fossil fuel industry continues to make billions in profits, they benefit doubly by using the University of California system as their research and experimental development centers. These companies gain access to world class researchers and greenwash their planet-killing practices by partnering with trusted public institutions,” wrote Adam Cooper last week in a guest essay for The Bee.
Cooper is a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric chemistry at UC San Diego and a climate organizer with the UC Green New Deal Coalition.
“The bare minimum step to take for the UC system would be a transparent disclosure of industrial funding and a robust conflict of interest disclosure policy. Better yet, institutions should provide oversight into the acceptance of fossil fuel funding or ban it outright,” Cooper wrote.
“While the raw amount of funding may seem staggering, it’s only a small portion of university research budgets. Why should the University of California sell out its image as a climate leader for so little? How long will that image hold up as the public increasingly scrutinizes the fossil fuel industry and their favorite partners in higher education?”
Opinion of the Week
“Mr. Murdoch would like you to leave now. You can come back tomorrow morning and gather your stuff.” — Former executive editor of The Bee, Gregory Favre, on his unceremonious removal at the Chicago Sun-Times by Rupert Murdoch, after it was bought — and subsequently gutted — by the media mogul.
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Have a lovely Sunday!
Robin
