November 2022 Archives

Jo Ann Wilburn is writing a novel, Tumbleweed, fictionalizing her family's 1948 journey from Oklahoma to California on Route 66. Her mother recorded her memories of the trip in a diary. Jo Ann has expanded on those memories with a great deal of research. But her publisher thinks she's got too much of a good thing:

Because of my need to cut the word count of my book down significantly from nearly 130,000 words, many cuts are those that added to historical value rather than story. It makes me sad because I like those historical references. I hope that by presenting some of those here, I can share an authentic 1948 trip down Route 66 and add a little extra as I go.

My parents made a real 1948 trip to California and my mother kept a diary, which I faithfully used in planning this fictional trip.

You can read these historical gems on her website starting here. There are now six installments, taking the family to Oklahoma City so far.

Although I've been driving Route 66 in Oklahoma for decades, through Jo Ann Wilburn's excerpts, I'm learning about people and places I had never heard of and discovering new details about familiar sites. A few examples: Seaba Station's little rock outhouse with the automatically flushing toilets; Washington Irving's camp site, Ulysses Grant Threatt and his filling station east of Luther.

Wilburn also has some blog entries discussing the process of writing her novel and the pain of making those cuts.

I hope you'll take time to visit her blog, catch up with the story so far, and drop Jo Ann a note to encourage her to continue to share these deep cuts (in the album sense as well as the novel sense) from her work. You can sign up to get email notifications of new entries as they're published.

In a column last week on the role ritual and prohibitions play in group identity for Christians, Rod Dreher recalled a passage in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology by Mary Douglas about Irish resistance to the Roman Catholic Church's decision to abolish the Friday fast and allowing meat on Fridays.

Reading today's Douthat piece put me in mind of anthropologist Mary Douglas's well-known 1970 book Natural Symbols. If you've heard about the book at all, it's probably in association with her analysis of the Second Vatican Council's ending the requirement that Catholics abstain from meat on Friday. She argued that the "Bog Irish" -- her term for working-class Irishmen in England -- kept the Friday fast despite the efforts of progressive priests to get them to stop, because it was a "condensed symbol" telling them who they were. That is, it signified connection to the past, to Irish identity, and to a cosmology. By casting aside this condensed symbol, Douglas contends, the Catholic hierarchy discarded something far more important than they understood.

Dreher, who has moved from Louisiana to Budapest, lamented that he left his copy of the book back in the States. He had to settle for a few Google Books excerpts from the first chapter.

I emailed him with good news, good news for everyone who wants to look up a half-remembered passage from a book that is temporarily inaccessible: The Internet Archive (archive.org) has a virtual lending library where you can borrow a book for an hour at a time and read it online, or borrow it for 14 days and download it to a DRM-enabled e-reader. All you need is to register for a free Internet Archive account.

For Natural Symbols, three copies were available for borrowing.

This is the Internet Archive's solution to the problem of works still under copyright. Older works, in the public domain because copyright has expired, are available instantly without an account and can be downloaded in numerous formats without restriction. The virtual lending library for copyrighted works simulates browsing in the stacks (the one-hour checkout) or taking it home (the 14-day loan). Special accommodations are available to the print-disabled for many titles.

The discussion of Irish Catholics and fish on Fridays put me in mind of similar extra-biblical restrictions that once defined the culture of many Baptist churches, including the one I grew up in, the First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills. We went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. We didn't drink and didn't dance. We knew stricter churches that banned standard playing cards, but Rook, without the face cards, was OK. I remember great debate in our church over the propriety of women wearing pants, instead of dresses, to church. My sixth-grade math teacher, Charlie Twiss, was a LDS bishop, and he couldn't join us for our Friday night class outing to see The Little Prince at the Loew's Delman Theater because Friday night was sacrosanct family time. Avoiding caffeine is another practice that would remind a Mormon of his identity and allegiance at very ordinary moments with friends and colleagues. Phrases beginning "We don't...." -- with the emphasis on We -- reinforce group identity.

In-person absentee voting will be available at in every county on Wednesday through Friday, November 2 - 4, 2022 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Saturday, November 5, 2022, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. In most counties, this will be at the County Election Board office or county courthouse; here is the full list of absentee-in-person voting sites. Seven counties have two absentee-in-person sites, including these four in the Tulsa metro area:

• Osage County: Fairgrounds Ag Building, Pawhuska; First Baptist Church, Skiatook (West Rogers Campus)
• Rogers County: Election Board; Central Baptist Church in Owasso
• Tulsa County: Election Board, 555 N. Denver; Hardesty Regional Library
• Wagoner County: First Baptist Church, Wagoner; NSU-BA, Broken Arrow

Polls will be open Tuesday, November 8, 2022, from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. In addition to the general election for federal, statewide, legislative, county, and judicial elections, runoffs for Tulsa City Council will be held in three seats. Unusually, there are no state questions on the ballot. Here is the complete list of ballot items, sorted by county.

NOTE: Precinct boundaries, voting locations, and district boundaries have changed, in some cases dramatically. Enter your name and date of birth on the Oklahoma State Election Board's online voter portal and you will see where to vote and your sample ballot.

In response to popular demand, I have assembled the guidance detailed below into a
downloadable, printable, single-page PDF.

Here are the candidates I'm recommending and (if in the district) voting for in the Oklahoma general election and City of Tulsa runoff election on November 8, 2022. (This entry will change as I decide to add more detail, link previous articles, or discuss additional races between now and election day. The entry is post-dated to keep it at the top.)

As I post this, I'm still unsure about several races, and there are other races I had planned to write about in detail, but time is short, people are voting, and many have asked for a summary of my recommendations.

Tulsa City Council:

District 5: Grant Miller (L)
District 6: Christian Bengel (R)
District 7: Ken Reddick (R)

Council races are officially non-partisan, and marking a straight-party vote doesn't cover these races. We need east and southeast Tulsa voters to elect all three of these conservative challengers, to defeat the left-wing incumbents, in order to have even the beginnings of a conservative voice at City Hall.

Statewide:

Governor: Kevin Stitt (R)
Lt. Governor: Matt Pinnell (R)
Attorney General: Lynda Steele (L)
Treasurer: Todd Russ (R)
Superintendent of Public Instruction: Ryan Walters (R)
Commissioner of Labor: Will Daugherty (L)
Corporation Commissioner: Kim David (R)

Why not straight-ticket GOP? A phony conservative and Biden donor, Gentner Drummond, won the GOP nomination for Attorney General with the help of massive amounts of dark money. The incumbent Labor Commissioner, Leslie Osborn, has expressed her loathing for conservatives and their values, despite the R by her name; I wouldn't be surprised if she follows Hofmeister and switches parties to run for governor as a Democrat in 4 years. Libertarian candidates are running in both elections, available for a protest vote.

Federal:

Whatever our disappointments with some of the Republican candidates this year, winning control of Congress requires us to elect as many Republicans as possible. Better still, we have the opportunity to re-elect a solid conservative in Kevin Hern and to add Josh Brecheen, a conservative with a solid legislative record.

US Senate (unexpired term): Markwayne Mullin (R)
US Senate (full term): James Lankford (R)
1st Congressional District: Kevin Hern (R)
2nd Congressional District: Josh Brecheen (R)
3rd Congressional District: Frank Lucas (R)
4th Congressional District: Tom Cole (R)
5th Congressional District: Stephanie Bice (R)

District Court:

District 14 District Judge, Office 12: Kevin Gray (R)

State Legislature:

State Senate 34: Dana Prieto (R)

State House 9: Mark Lepak (R)
State House 41: Denise Crosswhite Hader (R)
State House 66: Clay Staires (R)
State House 70: Brad Banks (R)
State House 71: Mike Masters (R)
State House 79: Paul Hassink (R)

County:

Tulsa County Assessor: John Wright (R)
Osage County Commissioner District 1: Everett Piper (R)
District Attorney, District 7 (Oklahoma County): Kevin Calvey (R)

Supreme Court retention:

Dustin P. Rowe: YES
James R. Winchester: NO
Dana Kuehn: YES
Douglas L. Combs: NO

Court of Civil Appeals retention:

Stacie L. Hixon: YES
Gregory C. Blackwell: YES
John F. Fischer: NO
Barbara G. Swinton: NO
Thomas E. Prince: YES

MORE INFORMATION:

OTHER CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some blogs, endorsement lists, candidate questionnaires, and sources of information for your consideration.

• Muskogee Politico news, questionnaires, and analysis
• Muskogee Politico on the judicial retention ballot
• Steve Fair and Georgia Williams on the judicial retention ballot
• Oklahoma Conservative PAC meeting videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahoma Constitution Index: Scores incumbent legislators on voting record
• iVoterGuide surveys of Oklahoma statewide, federal, and legislative candidates
• City Elders Tulsa speakers' videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahomans for Life candidate surveys
• Oklahomans for the 2nd Amendment (OK2A) endorsements
• NRA-PVF endorsements
• Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights (OKHPR) general election voter guide

ANTI-CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some endorsement lists that are negative indicators:

• Oklahomans for Public Education: OPE advocates for higher taxes, opposes school choice, and opposes efforts to keep leftist advocacy out of the classroom. They work to defeat principled Republicans. A yellow warning mark from OPE is a badge of honor for a conservative candidate. Here is the OPE voter guide for 2022 (backup copy).
• Oklahoma Education Association, state affiliate of the leftist NEA teachers' union, has endorsed nine Republicans in contested primaries. The list was leaked to Corey DeAngelis.

If you appreciate the many hours of research that went into this guide and into the rest of my election coverage, and if you'd like to help keep this site online, you can contribute to BatesLine's upkeep via PayPal. In addition to keeping me caffeinated, donated funds pay for web hosting, subscriptions, and paid databases I use for research. Many thanks to those generous readers who have already contributed.

An election eve assortment of thoughts:

Last week, I attended and live-tweeted the Tuesday, November 1, 2022, Red Wave rally in Oklahoma City featuring Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Kevin Stitt, and State Superintendent nominee Ryan Walters; the Wednesday Tulsa rally with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and a Wednesday lunch-time forum with Ryan Walters. In between the latter two events, I went for a walk in McClure Park.

On Saturday, I helped with a literature drop for Brad Banks, Republican nominee for the open House District 70 seat, going to almost every house. The area I covered was only 80 acres, an 1/8th of a square mile, but I walked 22,977 steps (10.8 miles), and it took me about 4 hours. It was a beautiful day for walking. I cheated a bit: We were supposed to hit every house, but I went home, downloaded the latest voter registration file, filtered down to the streets and blocks of the precinct section I volunteered to cover, did a unique sort on street and house number, put the list of house numbers in columns by street on a single workbook page, and used it to guide my walking. Making the list took me about 30 minutes. As it turned out, I probably didn't save much time, as this area had a registered voter at nearly every address. I didn't filter by frequency of past votes or party or change of address, which might have saved me a few steps.

More dark-money attacks in Monday's mail. One is from Imagine This Oklahoma (one of a raft of dark-money groups funded by Oklahoma Forward) targeting Stitt over inflation, complaining about the state's $3 billion rainy-day fund ("hoarding our tax dollars"), and subsidies that the legislature passed to try to attract Panasonic, Canoo, and Hollywood filmmakers. Of course, if Stitt had stopped any of these initiatives, they would have attacked him for killing job opportunities and smashing our state piggy bank.

The issues presented in the dark-money ads are never the real issues motivating the donors to attack their targets. If you knew who the donors were, you'd know their motivation, and you'd realize that the donors are seeking their own benefit at the expense of you, the taxpayer. So they stay hidden.

The City of Tulsa's odd and oft-changed election process comes to its 2022 conclusion Tuesday with runoffs in three of nine Tulsa City Council seats. Three incumbents, all registered to vote as Democrats, failed to reach the 50% threshold in the August general election and so face a runoff. The same three seats, Districts 5, 6, and 7, went to a runoff in the 2020 election as well.

Tulsa City Council races are on a separate printed ballot. Because they are nominally non-partisan (no party label appears on the city ballot), voting straight party on the main ballot for state, county, legislative, and judicial items will count for nothing on the city ballot.

In each of the three races, I urge you to vote for the conservative challenger. The Democrat incumbents are all embedded in the non-profit realm, with little or no exposure to the private sector where producing results for the customer determines your survival. The Council's unanimous allocation of $112,000 in federal COVID-19 relief funds to a sex survey targeting teens (with approval by Mayor GT Bynum IV) ought to be enough to convince you we need to throw all the bums out.

Currently there are no conservative leaders in Tulsa city government. Electing Grant Miller in District 5, Christian Bengel in District 6, and Ken Reddick in District 7 is an important first step toward ensuring that common-sense Tulsans have a voice at City Hall.

Thursday evening brought the news that AHHA, the Arts and Humanities Hardesty Arts Center in the "Tulsa Arts District," was closing its doors permanently on Friday.

At ahha, we've been dedicated to bringing arts to the Tulsa community since 1961. Over the years, we've expanded our partnerships to work collaboratively with at least eight area school districts, a local healthcare system, state and regional government agencies, and over 100 member arts and humanities organizations.

During the past few years, our community has seen some of the most challenging economic and social times in recent history. It is with great sadness that we announce the permanent closure of ahha Tulsa's Hardesty Center on Friday, November 4.

We will continue to pursue avenues to secure a long-term future for some of our programs and look to achieve that mission as quickly as possible.

We also learned this week that OKPOP is $30 million and a couple of years away from opening to the public; the first $30 million only paid for "skin and bones."

Two State Senate districts and six State House districts that overlap with Tulsa County have general elections on November 8, 2022. Neighboring counties add in four additional State House seats. Here's an overview with my recommendations in six of the races; details after the jump, and more to be added.

Senate 2: No recommendation
Senate 34: Dana Prieto (R)
House 9: Mark Lepak (R)
House 66: Clay Staires (R)
House 70: Brad Banks (R)
House 71: Mike Masters (R)
House 79: Paul Hassink (R)

Do Republican legislative leaders want so badly for Gov. Kevin Stitt to lose his bid for re-election that they're willing to accept half-measures on child mutilation in the name of "gender confirmation"? That's the question posed by a recent report by Harry Scherer in The American Conservative, "The Fight Over Child Mutilation in Oklahoma." Scherer asks why Oklahoma, with a Republican governor and Republican supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, has not seen a comprehensive law against gender reassignment surgeries on minors in Oklahoma.

Scherer notes that State Sen. Warren Hamilton (R-McCurtain) filed such a bill, HB 676, in early 2021, cosponsored by Senators Shane Jett (R-Shawnee) and David Bullard (R-Durant). The bill was assigned to the Health and Human Services and Appropriations committees, chaired by Paul Rosino (R-Oklahoma City) and Greg McCortney (R-Ada) respectively, never heard the bill.

The legislature did address the issue in a limited way during a recent special session to allocate federal funds:

On October 4, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed Senate Bill 3XX into law, which grants approximately $109 million to the state's University Hospital Authority. Some $39 million of those funds were appropriated for "behavioral health care for the children" of Oklahoma under the condition that the health system's facilities refuse to perform gender reassignment surgeries for minors.

Four conservative Republican State Senators voted no: Nathan Dahm, Hamilton, Jett, and Merrick.

Hamilton said he thinks Bill 3XX doesn't go far enough in some places and is wrong-headed in others. The law, which does nothing to regulate gender reassignment surgeries for minors at hospitals outside of the University Hospitals Authority and Trust, earmarks funds for the continuation of the health system's behavioral health care services and mental health counseling. These services are delivered through what Oklahoma Children's Hospital calls the Adolescent Medicine Roy G. Biv Program, which provides an "interdisciplinary team of highly trained specialists who serve the mental health, nutritional and medical needs of all LGBTQ youth." The program's "gender-affirming treatment & services" includes "discussing concerns or questions about gender" and "assisting with legal name or gender marker changes."

Oklahoma taxpayers shouldn't be funding any "gender-affirming" or "LGBTQ-affirming" care, which is grounded in unscientific and dangerous concepts of "sexual orientation" and "gender identity." We've elected Republican legislative supermajorities with the expectation that our tax dollars won't be paying for that garbage.

Dahm speculates on the reluctance of legislative leaders to take aggressive action:

"For them to promise that we'll do something next year when we've had the opportunity to do it for three years, and having served with them, with most promises that have never actually come to fruition, I don't put any credence behind their word that they'll get it done next year."

The senator was part of a failed effort to extend the special session of the legislature so that the more aggressive legislation could be taken up before this year's gubernatorial election. Dahm had a noteworthy theory for why his party's leadership has been kicking the can down the road: "I think that Senate leadership actually is trying not to give [Stitt] any more wins, because they'd rather have a Democrat that they can do veto overrides on so that they get the victory and they get the publicity, rather than having a strong governor lead the charge that steals their thunder and steals their potential media spotlight."

A spokesman for Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat denied Dahm's theory.

If legislative leaders want Stitt to lose, my guess is that it has more to do with the forces that are spreading political money around Oklahoma, working against conservative values and undermining the Republican platform. Groups with plenty of money and well-known grievances against Gov. Stitt include the teachers' unions, Big Pot, and tribal governments, all of whom have governmental priorities at odds with conservatives.

The chamberpots and RINOs have had no problem backing Democrats against Republicans they fear may be too principled to be manipulated. For a couple of examples, see Melissa Provenzano vs. Dan Hicks in HD 79 in 2018; Jo Anna Dossett vs. Cheryl Baber in SD 35 in 2020. It happened in my own race for Tulsa City Council in 2002; RINOs were angry at the successful defeat of a city sales tax increase by a shoestring campaign that Jim Hewgley, Mike Slankard, and I led, and they raised money for my Democrat opponent.

It may be time for conservative voters to purify the caucus by dumping the most compromised Republican legislators. Eight years ago, I encouraged Republican voters not to give a supporter and enabler of National Popular Vote a seat at the table in the majority Republican caucus.

Of course, we don't want to give the legislature to Democratic control, but if a few of the worst Republicans lost because conservatives didn't vote for them, it might have a salutary effect on the rest of the caucus. Probably too late to have an effect in this election, but worth considering for the future. A comparison of the campaign contribution and expenditure filings of the Republican and the Democrat in your district would give you a pretty clear picture of whether your GOP nominee is likely to vote with the lobbyists and the RINOs. (Go to the Candidate Search page on the Oklahoma Ethics Committee Guardian website, then select Committee Status Active, 2022 Election, State Representative or State Senator, and then the district. You can also visit this page and search for expenditure information for specific PACs.)

Warning signs would include a low conservative rating by the Oklahoma Constitution newspaper, funding by tribal governments, funding by donors in George Kaiser's network, endorsement and funding by teachers' unions and their allies. I've been noticing contributions from PACs associated with pharmaceutical firms Johnson & Johnson and Merck, which could be an attempt to buy support for future vaccine mandates.

If the local GOP candidate has CAMP on his mailer's bulk mail permit or "CAMPAIGN ADVOCACY MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS, LLC" on his expenditures report, remember that CAMP's principal, Fount Holland, helped Joy Hofmeister convince Republican voters that she was a pro-life conservative instead of a teachers' union tool ("can [the OEA] be quiet and stomach our right wing rhetoric long enough to get what they really want"), which got her the 2014 GOP nomination as State Superintendent and ultimately the platform to run for governor this year as a pro-abortion Democrat.

With new polls from Emerson College and WPA Intelligence showing Stitt leading Hofmeister by 9 points and 15 points, some legislators may wish they had been more vocal and generous in support of the governor's re-election effort.

If you knew how quickly people would forget you after your death, you would not seek in your life to please anyone but God.

-- John Chrysostom

I shared that memeified quote on FB recently, and it spawned a few other thoughts.

In central Europe, at least, you only rent your grave. John Banner, beloved as Sgt. Schultz in "Hogan's Heroes," died on a visit to his hometown of Vienna in 1973 and was buried there, but by 1988, the grave was no longer his. His grave marker was removed because the lease had expired and was not renewed by family. (He and his wife had no children.) Someone else was buried there and a new marker erected in 1988. (We enjoy watching at least one of the two nightly episodes, every weeknight at 9 on MeTV, channel 23.2.) A fan had tracked down the grave and placed a placard honoring Banner next to the headstone of the latest occupant.

When visiting Glarus, Switzerland, the hometown of my wife's great-grandfather, in 1990, we had expected to find graves with her family name in the churchyard. We were accustomed to graveyards in New England and the British Isles with very old memorials, and earlier in the same trip had seen the Old Jewish cemetery in Prague where tombstones are stacked on each other -- 12,000 representing 100,000 burials in a tiny plot of land. We were stunned to see that all the burials in this Swiss cemetery were quite recent.

In America, the likelier fate of old graves can be seen in the work of Orange Rex, who found a book of Muskogee County death certificates from 1910 to 1916 in an Oklahoma City thrift shop, has been tracking down graves and stories of the deceased, matching entries in the register against news stories and obituaries. That link leads to the Facebook group, An American History Mystery: A Tale of Death in Muskogee Co, OK 1910-1916, where he has been documenting his research, crowdsourcing additional information, and connecting with the distant relatives of the people whose lives are documented in these ledgers. Many of the people listed are buried in long-neglected cemeteries, reconquered by nature. A few names and stories have elicited reaction descendants, and one name -- Bass Reeves -- remains well known, but most are utterly forgotten. Orange Rex has located the Harding Cemetery north of Muskogee, overgrown even though the most recent burials are as recent as the 1990s.

Orange Rex recently posted on his research into the Lieber Cemetery. It was platted in 1905 by John L. Lieber, who was the first city attorney of Muskogee, owned five theaters in the city, and was been head of the commission on land disputes for the Dawes Commission. His wife Dora was the great granddaughter of an Indian Chief. It was set aside only for burials of blacks, up to 2000 graves. He figures that as many as 1000 were buried there. Yet 117 years later, only one local historian ("former 2 time Genealogy club president and 15 year museum curator") knew about the cemetery but didn't know its name.

Orange Rex, the finder of these records, is a professional firebreather. He writes:

Only God has the right sense of humor to put a fire breather in charge of the lost paper records which might be the only records of their lives besides their bones.

I'll breathe the fire of life back into this history. Yesterday I saw a headstone for the first time of a laundry woman that died during childbirth in 1912. Sarah E Clark.

From my research.

I KNEW HER MIDDLE NAME, OCCUPATION AND HOW SHE DIED.

It was a weird sense of pride weighted with the gravity of being the keeper of that knowledge.

Tempus fugit. Memento mori.