Gay pride, straight news

Source: Facebook

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA – At their May 7 meeting, Borough Council members approved a permit for a gay pride festival on June 8 at IRMC Park downtown. The vote was 6-2, an uncertain endorsement of tolerance.

True, public opposition was impassioned, reminiscent of school board debates over masking policies during the pandemic. Opponents of the permit for the Pride Alliance of Indiana were likewise loud. The police chief escorted one particularly agitated citizen out of the meeting.

So, how did the two Council opponents explain their nay votes?

Councilor Tamara Collazzo, R-Ward 4, responded promptly to a May 9 email to report that she was indisposed. (“I have to take a chipmunk to a sanctuary.”) Her May 15 follow-up email said the emailer’s voice-mail box was not working. Well, how about scheduling an interview at the councilor’s convenience? No reply.

Councilor Jessica Frick responded in a May 14 email that reflected the will of the popular majority at the May 7 Council meeting.

“I am not against any group of individuals in our community,” Ms. Frick wrote. “I am however against drag shows being on the streets on display for the under-18 crowd. IRMC Park’s events are supposed to be welcoming to all, private events are not held there.”

She continued: “There were hundreds of Indiana borough and county residents who stated that this event was not safe for our children. If it is not safe for our children, then the event is not welcoming to our entire community. I for one agree wholeheartedly, as does the research, that sexual scenes are not healthy for children. I believe this event is not safe for our children and therefore I voted against it.“

The Pittman civics seminar

State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, Kovalchick Center, IUP, April 18, 2024. Photo: Indiana Gazette

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA – During an April 18 luncheon at the Kovalchick Center, speakers addressed high-school students attending a civics seminar on the legislative branch of government. The annual event is sponsored by state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, and it draws students from 41^st District counties he represents.

“There is no Republican or Democratic way to fill a pothole,” IUP President Michael Driscoll told students, attributing the quote to former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat. (The quote is a cliche, dating back in various forms to New York City Mayor and congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, a socialist member of the Republican Party in the 1930s and ‘40s.)

But cliches endure despite loss of meaning – in this case, that the politics of potholes are non-partisan. Not exactly. Consider “infrastructure” – a four-syllable synonym for the two-syllable “pothole.” Infrastructure now reflects a key difference between the two political parties.

During the train-wreck administration of Republican Donald Trump, his long-promised Infrastructure Week rollout was a long-running joke. Despite bipartisan support, an infrastructure proposal never emerged from his White House.

During the presidential administration of Democrat Joe Biden, on the other hand, the president signed into law the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill before the end of his first year in office. Two additional infrastructure measures followed in 2022.

All Republican members of Pennsylvania’s House delegation, except one, opposed the measures. (Opponents included Republican U.S. Reps. Glenn Thompson and Guy Reschenthaler, both representing parts of Indiana County.) Every Democratic member from Pennsylvania supported the measures.

Indiana Pride and prejudice

Foreground: Indiana Pride Alliance members; background: six masked men waving anti-LGBTQ+ placards and a Confederate flag. Philadelphia Street, Indiana, Pa., March 24, 2024. Photo: Facebook

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA – This year’s IUPatty’s weekend weather was cool, damp and windy – the kind of conditions that local officials hope will put a damper on what they call the annual “spring high-celebratory event.” Sure enough, a communitywide collaboration of university authorities and police agencies reported that the weekend was “relatively quiet.” IRMC hospital reported “business as usual.”

But Sunday afternoon, March 24, was sunny and warm. The weather heated a mid-afternoon incident in the heart of the downtown business district that did not appear in the IUPatty’s weekend wrap. The incident was neither quiet nor usual.

Video and photos appeared on social media. Borough police Chief Justin Schawl described the incident in a March 27 email:

“A disturbance” at 1:40 p.m. on Sunday drew borough police to the 600 block of Philadelphia Street.

“Officers arrived to find a group in the mid-block area, on the south sidewalk, engaged in an emotionally charged exchange,” Chief Schawl reported. “Officers observed six males wearing dark clothing and dark face coverings.” The black-clad masked men were “holding two poster boards with anti-LGBT sentiment and waving two flags, one of which was the confederate flag.”

 Chief Schawl continued:

“Across the street was an event advertised as a Pride Benefit Gala. A crowd was also formed on the north sidewalk holding at least one poster board with an LGBT support message and waving at least one pride flag.”

No arrests were reported. But police are “actively investigating a specific instance of verbal harassment,” the chief concluded. 

IUP med school: ‘something bold and different’

By Dana Driscoll

INDIANA — There has been a lot of debate in the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus community about the proposed School of Osteopathic Medicine. I’m writing today in support of the proposed school because I have first-hand experiences with how such a new medical school can elevate the status of a university and enrich a campus.

I have been a faculty member at IUP for almost nine years. Before that, I was an assistant and then associate professor at Oakland University from 2009-2015. OU is located in Rochester, Michigan, and was once a satellite of Michigan State University.  Even after gaining its independence and R2 status as a doctoral university with high research activity, many people still saw OU as a lesser choice than other state institutions, like Michigan State or University of Michigan. Like IUP, OU was a public institution with a strong union and an emphasis on education, arts and sciences.

Several months before I started my tenure-track position at OU in 2009, the William Beaumont School of Medicine received final approval. In 2011, the Beaumont school opened to accept new students. We had almost 3,000 applicants for the 50 seats in the inaugural class. This was the first medical school that had opened in the state in almost 50 years. And by 2015, the inaugural class had a 100 percent match rate into their residency positions.

Fossil fuels, past and future

Tyler Shank, of Penn Mechanical Group in White Township, addresses March 12 ceremony to mark the plugging of 200 abandoned oil and gas wells during the administration of Gov. Josh Shapiro, right. Photo: Indiana Gazette

Coal town chronicles

By David Loomis

INDIANA – On March 12, Gov. Josh Shapiro celebrated plugging 200 abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells since he took office in 2023. Among the celebrants at the Butler County event was an Indiana County company that plugged the 200^th well.

Penn Mechanical Group, a family-owned firm employing 150 workers in White Township, expressed gratitude for the governor’s energy-policy priorities. The governor reciprocated.

“By plugging orphaned and abandoned wells, we’re tackling a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and creating thousands of good-paying jobs in the process,“ Mr. Shapiro said.

Those jobs have their work cut out for them. The state Department of Environmental Protection has estimated the number of abandoned and orphaned conventional wells statewide at 560,000. (Fracking wells are not included; they are classified as unconventional.)

And the inventory grows. A January 2023 DEP report found more than 3,000 newly abandoned wells during 2017-2021. The environmental agency reported that nearly two-thirds of well drillers failed to submit annual reports during the period. Result: abandoned wells leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change and harms public health.

 It’s not just red tape and paperwork that well drillers are skipping, nor is it just moral responsibility for stewardship that they are ignoring. It’s taxpayers who they are stiffing.

Money to help pay Penn Mechanical Group for abandoned-well plugging is coming from President Biden’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But the federal cash will cover only a fraction of the need. Long-term, the money should come from well drillers.

Justice for Jim Fogle, et al.

Innocence Project attorney Karen Thompson and exoneree Jim Fogle at his 2015 release from Pennsylvania prison.

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA – On Monday, the Pennsylvania General Assembly reconvenes its 2024 session after a three-month recess. Lawmakers face a whole legislative cannery that they have kicked down the road.

But one priority should stand out for Indiana County lawmakers and constituents – a bill to  provide compensation and services to people wrongfully convicted and imprisoned in Pennsylvania.

Like Jim Fogle.

Mr. Fogle, of Indiana County, spent 34 years behind bars for a 1976 rape and murder of a Cherry Tree teen that he did not commit. In 2014, DNA evidence eliminated him as a suspect.

In 2015, he was released from prison as Pennsylvania’s longest-serving exoneree. He set to work  suing the judicial, prosecutorial and investigative authorities from the county courthouse to the state capital who were responsible for the miscarriage of justice.

In 2022, he won a $250,000 settlement from Indiana County. In November 2023, he won a $13 million settlement from the commonwealth.

That historically large payment was not known until earlier this month when a records request by an investigative reporter uncovered the payout from a state government insurance agency.

Supervisor, spare that tree

White’s Woods Nature Center entrance, North 12th Street, Indiana, Pa.

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA — For 50 years, White’s Woods has attracted legions of tree-huggers. Since 1974, fans of the 250-acre recreational forest have repeatedly defended the leafy refuge against politically and commercially motivated interests who evidently never appreciated “Woodman, Spare That Tree.”

The 1837 poem and the song it inspired were popular as the Industrial Revolution began to ravage Pennsylvania forests. The compositions mark a first for music as a medium for environmental advocacy.

No surprise that environmentalism would find roots in the commonwealth. William Penn required 17^th century settlers to preserve one acre of forest for every five acres cleared. Not for nothing did the colonizing Quaker call the place “sylvania.”

Nineteenth-century industrialists ignored Penn’s requirement. Railroads, iron furnaces, sawmills, pulp mills and leather tanneries consumed so much forest that the state’s north-central region was called “Pennsylvania’s Desert.” Loggers left wildfire, soil erosion, flooding and devastation in their trail.

History may motivate 21^st century forest fans. A local chronology records that White Township supervisors first sparked alarm in 1974 when they considered a subdivision that would have intruded on White’s Woods. Public opposition helped halt the development.

Subsequent proposals to cut the forest – in 1995, 2007, 2020, et cetera – reflected township supervisors’ mulish insistence on harvesting timber despite equally insistent public opposition. In 2020, for example, one IUP biologist reviewed the township’s proposed “forest management plan” for White’s Woods Nature Center and estimated it could remove “something like 56 percent of the tree volume in the entire park.”

Hunting in White’s Woods? Bad idea

Photo: David Loomis

Reported opinion

By Willard Radell

WHITE TOWNSHIP — Dana Milbank’s emotional plea to eliminate the deer-browsing menace through ramped-up hunting ignores some complicating facts about hunting in selected zones in suburban areas. Once these facts are faced, hunting in suburban areas for ecological reasons is revealed to be an ineffective deer management side-trip that makes people feel like something is being done, with little or no improvement in the problem that motivated it.

Milbank blames the “ecological bullies” for eating up the forest understory and worries that deer density in his part of Virginia’s Rappahannock County with 40-50 deer per square mile is an ecological disaster for the 27 humans per square mile who live there.

It could be asked of Milbank, How’s the understory doing on the spacious, herbicide-sotted lawns and savannahs of suburban and exurban northern Virginia? The ecological damage of those 27 humans per square mile probably dwarfs the damage of those 40 deer claimed to be in his square mile by orders of magnitude.

In The Washington Post version of Milbank’s column, he invites a “walk into the forest …. past the edge between field and woods where invasive vines now dominate, and you will find a manicured scene: all mature trees and no understory – none of the seedlings, saplings, flowers and shrubs that once covered the forest floor.”

The same could be said of the typical, sprawling, suburban human homestead: A walk in the former forest reveals that it is gone, replaced by McMansions, pools, sprawling lawns and savannahs, supported by ample applications of herbicide to prevent incursion by both invasive and native plants that might disturb the green uniformity of the grass.

Milbank seems to believe that when he kills his deer as a novice gun owner, “I’ll be donating what I don’t eat (for ‘locavores,’ there’s no food more local than a deer consumed on the very land where it lived) to Hunters for the Hungry, a nonprofit that processes and donates venison.” I wonder if Milbank has thought this through. The .30-06 caliber he plans to use easily has a range of 1,000 yards. So for his neighbors’ sake, I hope he’s learned enough in his few hours at a gun range that he’s good enough to take only clean shots.

Solitary confinement stole my family

Devlin Webb. Photo by David Loomis

Opinion

 By Devlin Webb

INDIANA – I spent five years of a 10-year sentence in isolation in Pennsylvania state prisons. Recently I was heartened to learn that prisoners at the State Correctional Institution at Fayette in La Belle have filed a class-action lawsuit against the commonwealth for its cruel and unusual solitary-confinement conditions.

Plaintiffs said stretches in solitary were long and conditions “tortuous.” They described attempting suicides, flooding their cells with dirty toilet water, punching walls and writing in their own blood, according to their attorneys. Plaintiffs include inmates with serious mental illness who were denied mental-health care, prevented from participating in education or rehabilitation programs and barred from attending religious services.

Their 53-page complaint describes abuses that are familiar to me. The lawsuit is long overdue. As one of the lead plaintiffs concluded, “This is torture in its highest form, and it must end now.”

Rep. Reschenthaler’s memory

U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa. Photo: Associated Press

Reported opinion

By David Loomis

INDIANA – U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., represents most of Indiana County in Congress. In 2022, he won re-election without opposition to a third term.

He also represents Donald Trump. Mr. Reschenthaler posts a 100 percent average score in support of the insurrectionist-in-chief. As a Trump toady, Mr. Reschenthaler continues to carry water for the disgraced former president.

For example, the Feb. 8 special counsel’s report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents included a gratuitous ad hominem swipe at the president’s memory. Mr. Reschenthaler promptly called on the president to resign, echoing his classified-documents mishandler-in-chief, Mr. Trump.

“Joe Biden lacks the mental fitness to be president of the United States,” Mr. Reschenthaler argued.

Mr. Reschenthaler failed to note an important distinction between investigations of Mr. Biden’s documents and of Mr. Trump’s: Mr. Biden cooperated and returned his documents;  Mr. Trump did not. When asked, Mr. Trump resorted to a coverup that drew criminal indictment.

Perhaps Mr. Reschenthaler’s memory failed him, despite credentials as a former attorney, district judge and Navy judge advocate general.