Noticing and Nothingness
Steve Sailer’s Lifetime Achievement Award
I come to bury Sailer, and to praise him
If you’re reading this you probably know who Steve Sailer is, but if you don’t he’s a former marketing executive whose interest in genuine racial diversity (as opposed to the “Diversity” of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”) led him into journalism in the nineties, where he contributed to The National Review until his insight and honesty in dealing with racial questions led William F Buckley to send him packing in his bowdlerizing purge of the magazine in 1997.
Since then Steve has spent the current century exploding the various blank slate errata making up today’s secular dispensation, analyzing and expounding on social and political trends with a unique combination of common sense and penetrating insight. For this temerity he’s been forced to publish from the obscurity of his iSteve blog, hosted since 2014 by Ron Unz’ rogue website The Unz Review, which specializes in publishing writers and ideas banished from the mainstream.
This year he released an anthology of his work, Noticing: An Essential Reader by Steve Sailer. Offered for direct purchase by small alternative outlet Passage Press, there’s a relatively reasonably priced paperback and a limited run of leather bound “Patrician” versions for $395 dollars.
This will not be a review of the book but of its promotion.
Over the years Steve’s casually thrown off more useful concepts, insights and memorable phrases than one can keep track of. Over time these have percolated up through layers of suppression to influence—almost always without credit—polite conservatives. His description of open borders combined with liberal intervention, “invade the world, invite the world” found its way into conservative parlance; his call for Republicans to adopt policies designed to create “affordable family formation”; his description of the identity politics regime as “the coalition of the fringes”; his mocking of “Ellis Island kitsch” and “the zeroth amendment” to the Constitution demanding anyone in the world having a right to emigrate to America and bullying resistance to mass immigration; his “Sailer Strategy” (more on that below); his phrasing of racial diversity as “human biodiversity (HBD); his definition of race as a “partially inbred extended family”; his unearthing of the barrier to ill-advised democracy promotion in other cultures, consanguineous marriage, or marriage between cousins, making familial bonds more important than citizenship; his exposure of the hypocrisy of liberalism now: “the typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don’t; b] he has a high IQ, but they don’t” his “high and low against the middle”, as in elite demagogy setting lower classes and disaffected against the hated middle class to maintain power; these are but a few of Sailer’s original ideas.
But coinciding with Sailer’s remarkable career of pointing out the lies and obfuscations of the powerful has been the steady consolidation of their power. That consolidation accelerated in the response to Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president and subsequent administration, as a desperate elite launched the current regime of censorship based initially on the Russian collusion hoax and expanded now to include any dissenting views proving troublesome to power. In a very real sense it can be said that frantic but successful shutting down of dissent in response to Trump has been a response to the success of Sailer’s ideas.
In 2000 Steve suggested his Sailer Strategy for Republican presidential candidates, advising they maximize white voter turnout with policy focused on making it easier to start a family (“affordable family formation”) and sensible immigration restriction, rather than their Quixotic election cycle appeals to the “natural conservatives” of the growing Hispanic population and serial promotion of black mediocrities.
Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy proved the Sailer Strategy effective—to the outrage of the elite and chagrin of even the Republican establishment. Furthermore Trump’s popular appeal (if not his governance in office) under the banner of “Maga” bears close resemblance to another Sailer notion, “citizenism”, which is simply the philosophy that the country should be run on behalf of its citizens without favor for race, sexuality, sex, immigration status—the components of Steve’s “coalition of the fringes” now dominating our politics. Citizenism was nothing new but a call to restore the principle of a colorblind constitutionalism taken for granted before the sixties ushered in the perverse present. But for Sailer reintroducing this obvious idea also was a means to circumvent what he saw as the otherwise inevitable rise of white identity politics, where white Americans openly, rather than implicitly, took their own side in the fray of identity politics dominating our elections—and which Trump, of all people, seems to be unsettling now.
Furthermore Trump’s “America First” slogan evoking citizenism under another name combined with his opposition to wars of liberal intervention brings to mind yet another aforementioned Sailerism: invade the world/invite the world. Trump therefore brought two of Sailer’s central theses into play in sudden, dramatic fashion in 2016. Steve didn’t seem to notice and by the time Trump was ousted and challenging the 2020 election results at the Supreme Court he dismissed Trump’s fight with a shrug, seemingly content to be relieved of the embarrassing association with the boorish Trump and adding to his growing catalogue of conventional views the refusal to find anything suspect in the last presidential election.
Since then Steve’s fall from grace—for some—has only accelerated. He’s accepted uncritically the covid narrative, including lockdowns and mandatory vaccines, embraced the demonization of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and steered clear of Israel’s destruction of Gaza after October 7 and the subsequent unleashing of American law enforcement on protesters, choosing instead to take up, half-heartedly, the fight against “antisemitism”.
As new divisions on the right coalesce around the post October 7 moment, with the “far right” dividing between antisemitic and antizionist forces on one hand and pro-Israel rightwingers on the other, Sailer’s ideas have proven more useful to the latter. From this quarter comes now an argument ostensibly based on Steve’s “racist” writings about “HBD”, invoking the supposed intellectual inferiority of brown Palestinians and even in one case cousin-marriage—which Sailer once demonstrated was antithetical to American attempts to install a liberal democracy in Iraq—to justify Israeli atrocities.
It is with a profound sense of pathos that I consider this supposed revival and belated recognition of Sailer who seems to have acquired a whole new generation of admirers to replace the many more who have fallen away in recent years, some embittered with a sense of betrayal, some depressed with a sense of futility and some perhaps exhausted by the repetition of points long ago proved—and now proven to make no difference.
Steve’s victory lap in promotion of the book is not the beginning of Sailer’s long-overdue influence on the national dialogue, but the end of it; more whimper than bang. Sailer is being given the equivalent of a belated lifetime achievement award with relief that whatever threat he posed is long gone and with the apparent confidence that his ideas on race and IQ can now be the grounds for defending Jewish domination of American politics.
It seems less that Sailer is being rewarded for his bold transgressions, as his arriviste promoters now, one part clueless and one part disingenuous, proclaim, but more as if he’s being rewarded for his compliance. Compliance to the suspect covid narrative; compliance to the US’ proxy war on Russia through the destruction of Ukraine; compliance to the solidifying of Jewish dominance, based on the “merit” of superior intelligence, over America. Above all Sailer has signaled that he is opposed to any explicit expression of white advocacy. After years of exposing the lies upon which the system is now founded Sailer has shown he will not abandon his ultimate faith in the system, whatever form it takes and wherever it leads from its terrifying present.
Meanwhile Sailer carries on lapping the competition in a race long ago won and no longer relevant. Another memorable phrase of Steve’s, the “point and sputter”, describing the unfortunately effective but intellectually dishonest practice of pointing out and defaming as “racist” or otherwise verboten statements or ideas without any attendant substantive refutation of their veracity remains in effect and effective, while Sailer continues to indulge in what I call the point and titter, the practice of pointing out conventional absurdities for a laugh but to no meaningful effect—and beyond this point it isn’t clear their effect isn’t in fact deleterious, acting as an energy sink and diversion.
For a long time but, notably, not for a while now, Sailer expressed confidence in the triumph of truth, of the steady march of facts and new revelations in the study of genetics to finally overcome the lies of egalitarianism. I recall him citing an anonymous anecdote: a race realist asked by a leftist university professor how long it would take before race realism would become publicly undeniable, with the professor lapsing into thoughtful silence at the answer—in a few decades or so—as if contemplating the consequences. Well the professor need not have worried, we can see now. Steve and his readers thought something would have to give over time. Something gave all right, but it wasn’t the elite’s hold on power or the power of their lies. Sailerism is resolving not in what Steve predicted—a world not much different than the one we see now, but unencumbered by absurd misconceptions. No, it seems more likely now that Sailer’s contribution will be the justification of elite power, dominated by Jews, on the basis of, ironically enough, racial supremacy. His critics got it half right, and may be relieved for that reality.
My heart is in the coffin there with Sailer, and I must retrieve it before it’s buried there with him.
PDX Decline Report 6.19.23: Hearth and Homeless
The Northwest is Lit
Last month a rent-subsidized 110 year-old Portland apartment building was gutted when a resident scheduled for eviction that day lit a fire.
Twitter account @PDXReal broke the story.
Garrett Repp had been harassing his neighbors, particularly the women in his building, and repeatedly pulling the fire alarm, perhaps to inure residents to it. He allegedly created his own escape suite before starting the fire.
Garrett A. Repp was arrested Thursday evening on 31 charges, including multiple counts of first-degree arson, reckless endangerment and first-degree criminal mischief in the fire at The May apartments in the city’s Goose Hollow neighborhood…
Portland Police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Allen said Repp, 30, was arrested the day of the blaze because building management had reported him on May 9 for “breaking through the wall of his apartment” and tunneling into the vacant unit next door. Repp was charged with one count of first-degree criminal mischief and released later on May 16. The case has since been closed.
No one was seriously injured during the inferno, but the flames displaced the residents of all 42 units and killed an unknown number of pets. The building likely will be torn down.
He was under a restraining order for allegedly stalking and pulling an incubus on an ex girlfriend who lived a few blocks away.
Repp was well-known to residents at The May apartments, according to interviews with three tenants, who said he had pulled the fire alarm for no reason more than a dozen times since he moved in last November and had chased female tenants with a sword or banged on their doors…
John Judge, a resident at The May, said he frequently saw Repp sitting on the front stoop smoking, with a “crazy look in his eye.”
In Portland this is called blending in.
Repp was one of many in Portland with mental health and drug problems living in subsidized housing (which is likely paid by disability benefits). His building seems to have been merely rent-subsidized by income, either the entire building or some number of required units, putting him in the same building with younger Portlanders paying exorbitant rent for the converted studios in the aging building. At the other end of the subsidy spectrum are transitional and longer term housing for the homeless, Permanent Supportive Housing, with services for them in the building and assigned case workers for residents. Rents subsidized as much as 60% can still be expensive here, and the chronically homeless who are managing to meet them have to be relying on income subsidized by disability payments. The building of these buildings of course also has to be subsidized, through a labyrinthian process of multiple funding sources, and a massive affordable housing bond passed by voters in 2016 has only produced two building so far.
The management of these properties isn’t always the best.
Judge said it was unclear why Repp was never arrested for allegedly pulling the alarm or harassing other tenants.
Rachel Elkins, a spokesperson for the building’s owner, SkyNat Property Management, said the company was not commenting on the matter at the direction of their attorney.
SkyNat filed an eviction order against Repp on Feb. 14, alleging he owed $3,400 in back rent and late fees. Repp failed to appear in court to challenge the allegation, records show, and on May 10 a judge ordered sheriff’s deputies to remove him from his third-floor apartment.
Later the building was looted. Skynat referred residents to their insurance companies.
“As I understand, everything is lost from my particular unit,” Ehrett said. “The only form of communication from them in the 3+ weeks was an email with no subject line, saying ‘You can list suspected arson in the cause for your renter’s insurance.’”
When I attempted to take a photo of the burnt-out building from behind the police tape a cop shooed me away. What about the occupied homeless tents inside the tape, I asked. He just gave me a look.
Calls to Portland Fire and Rescue have risen with the homeless population. The city only started tracking homeless camp fires in 2019; they’ve doubled since then.
Fires have risen along with homelessness. Portland’s free weekly Willamette Week has been filling the vast space between progressive hysterics and moderate liberalism in Portland (their competition The Mercury, its more vociferous and progressive competitor, recently had to abandon its print edition) and has been doing actual journalism. They reported on homeless camp fires in
…[n]early half of all fires in Portland now start in or near houseless camps—at least 2,048 last year, according to Portland Fire & Rescue data. It’s a remarkable number, given how five years ago, fires among unhoused Portlanders were hardly a blip.
Today, there are an average of six a day.
If you move about much in Portland you typically see or smell small fires often. The fires, stemming from things like makeshift heating arrangements, smoking addicts leaving lit propane torches about as they pass out and sometimes arson committed by other homeless, occasionally create larger problems. When the fire department had to sledgehammer their way through a concrete wall to rescue homeless from a fire they had started under Portland’s Steel Bridge, a vertical-lift drawbridge built in 1915, they found a little cave network that required shutting the bridge down while the dirt was filled back in to restore the structural integrity.
Kicking the Homeless to the Curb, and ‘burbs
The Portland City Council just passed a ban on camping on city streets during the daytime. From 8 AM to 8 PM it will be illegal to camp on city sidewalks. The homeless will still be allowed to sleep on the street at night, but the effect of them having to pack their belongings and decamp by 8 AM daily, should enforcement succeed, is expected to greatly decrease their presence downtown.
Most notably, the ordinance bans camping outside between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and requires people to pick up all personal property before leaving an area.
It also prohibits camping within 250 feet of schools, shelters, and childcare centers, as well as within pedestrian zones like crosswalks. Campers are not allowed to use gas heaters in or around their campsite.
Anyone who violates the ordinance three or more times, or who has multiple violations within 24 hours, faces a $100 fine and up to 30 days in jail.
Where will they go? Those on the streets downtown now are the hardest cases, hopeless addicts and the mentally ill. The overwhelming majority of them are not capable or willing to accept the rules that come with any traditional long term shelter arrangements. Just providing an overnight shelter bed is a problem with many or most of these people due to mental health and drug problems. Not that the beds are there.
There are more than 6,000 people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, according to this year’s federally required tally of unhoused people. Of those, nearly 4,000 are unsheltered.
The county has around 2,000 shelter beds, according to county data.
Shepherding them into the Mayor’s planned mass camp sites outside the city anchors Wheeler’s plan but the city has yet to bring one of them online, much less demonstrate they will work. The city’s Safe Rest Village plan housing people by the tens in fenced-in tiny houses with community amenities is small and having its own problems managing residents.
So aside from the council’s vague plan what is its expectation? Any reasonable expectation is the ban will disperse the bulk of the homeless concentrated downtown to outlying areas. The law will apply throughout the city but an understaffed Portland Police Bureau can’t be expected to enforce it evenly throughout. Their focus will be on homeless concentrated on the downtown streets they’re trying to reclaim. Outlying Portland and adjacent cities can expect to absorb some of the displaced and the city is probably counting on it.
Portland at Midweek
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Serial Killer in Portland?
It’s an old trope in crime fiction: a serial killer is on the loose but the authorities don’t want to alarm the public and won’t give their Cassandra-like detective the resources he needs. Then he goes rogue.
The Portland Police Bureau is discouraging rumors a serial killer is active in Portland, after six women were found dumped in wooded areas outside of Portland over a three month stretch.
Promising to communicate with the public if anything changes, PPB said the cases do not present an “articulable danger” at the moment.
Speculation runs wild on Twitter.
One reason for the rumors is the women were drug users and/or homeless; at least one has a violent criminal record. A woman found dead in a tent in the Lents neighborhood police are not calling a homicide (the five others appear to have been dumped where they were found); police revealed one died of blunt force trauma but haven’t given the causes of death in the other cases.
One of the victims was said to frequent Portland’s notorious fentanyl market downtown. One relative is accusing the police of misleading the public.
It’s an unfortunate time for any authority seeking to establish trust with the public after the obfuscations of Covid and the daily gaslighting around race, sex and “gender”. The Portland Police Bureau has the added problem of having had its image thoroughly gutted by the last almost-three years since the BLM riots. Despised as Nazis by the left and feckless by the right. An interesting question that will never be asked is whether the flight of qualified cops from the Bureau over this time leaves it less capable to deal with either a serial killer or the standard mayhem they insist explains these cases.
The only real reason police have for discouraging “panic” about a potential serial killer is a high-profile media-driven case puts them on the hook.
Six unrelated murders of people who abandoned or were abandoned by society don’t register for the public; tie them together with the “serial killer” label and instantly the fascination with serial killers with which we’ve all been conditioned by film and television is conjured in us, and we come alive. Pardon the phrase.
Target: Target
I went to Target in search of pride; specifically to see for myself one of their “Pride Month” displays. The store just outside of Portland looked busy enough on a Saturday and the lines at the registers were long, though that may have been due to understaffing.
The Pride display was in the front of the store but so small and tame it took me a while to find it.
There were two smaller displays in the store that I found.
I visited a second Target that shared this model, a display up front with two or three mannequins, then one or two stations reminding us to “Celebrate Pride month” and “take pride”. Very subdued.
But what about the everyday, typical Target aesthetic? I took a lap around the store to sample that, weaving through milling Mestizo housewives having bored conversations in Spanish as they rooted out children’s underwear; they appeared oblivious to the models looming over us like icons in a church. Like me they aren’t represented there, despite all the clamor about how the iconography being offered celebrates, at long last, people like them in all their glorious mediocrity. They probably haven’t even heard this schtick, don’t care and weren’t asked about it anyway.
The world as represented and celebrated in Target is overwhelmingly Black!, female and overweight.
Where it is not that it is queer, sexually ambiguous, and racially ambiguous.
Beyond that there seems to be a trend in freckles, lots of freckles, in particular the freckles of the Black! “redbone” type, as the manifestation of diverse ancestry.
Also vitiligo. Because of course.
Fashion advertising has long had a thing for gap-toothed Black! women; here they seem to be deployed where the need for an explicitly heterosexual pitch (selling mascara to aspiring hoes, for instance) is tempered with race.
On my way out I lingered for a moment near the little Pride display up front, taking another discrete photo when a young couple–heterosexual, normal–working their way through the rows of clothing behind, stumbled into it.
“Gay.” One of them said, with a depressed revulsion, as if they’d been combing the beach and came upon a dead seagull. They turned about.
Whether or not the apparent easing up on propaganda for this year’s Pride Month is due to exhaustion I don’t know, but that exhaustion exists.
Performative Portland
Scenes From a City Hall
A recent poll of voters in Portland’s Multnomah County showed high support for a daytime city camping ban Mayor Ted Wheeler has introduced in an attempt to reclaim downtown this summer. The Oregonian:
Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban, which is scheduled to receive a public hearing at the City Council on Wednesday.
The poll was conducted by a Republican-friendly firm for “People for Portland”, an advocacy group set up by wealthy Oregon liberals to counter progressive excesses following as a consquence of the BLM riots of 2020.
Longtime Oregon political consultants Dan Lavey and Kevin Looper launched People for Portland in 2021. The group has since raised and spent more than $1 million, primarily from a clutch of wealthy — and mostly anonymous — donors…Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and Harsch Investment Real Estate CEO Jordan Schnitzer previously acknowledged to The Oregonian/OregonLive that they’ve given money to the group.
Homeless advocates in Portland oppose anything but the present status quo: pursuing the ever-receding goal of “affordable housing” while they continue to apply the harm reduction model as applied to substance abuse (assisting addicts in “safe” drug use in opposition to criminalization or coercion) to homelessness broadly, and to continue being paid to do it without interference.
They also don’t want competition. Wheeler’s ban comes as the city moves forward with his plan to corral the homeless in mass campsites run by a controversial non-profit out of the Bay Area called Urban Alchemy; the outsider outfit signed a 50 million-dollar deal to operate them after no locals would offer a meaningful bid.
Urban Alchemy uses ex-cons (with some predictable results) to manage similar camps around San Francisco and broke out of obscurity when it used its contacts in city government to land a series of fat, no-bid contracts as the city and state started pouring money into homelessness in 2019. The ban on daytime street camping is intended to compel the homeless into Wheeler’s designated camping sites, the first of which is not yet up and running and will accommodate either 300 people or plots, it’s not clear.
Yesterday a public hearing was held on the camping ban, a six hour-plus marathon, dominated by opponents. At one point it was interrupted by a current cliche–a high outrage low information white woman chanting–with a twist: she accused the council of being “pedos”.
In May of 2017 Jeremy Christian stabbed two men to death on a commuter train in Portland. The case became notorious due to the mentally ill Christian’s “white supremacist” beliefs–presumed because he was verbally abusing a Muslim before his victims intervened (not unlike the Daniel Penny case). After the case went public a woman appeared to say she had encountered Christian on the train a day earlier, threatening her with racial slurs and giving her permanent eye damage after striking her with a “half filled Gatorade bottle”. Her story was never corroborated and video shows her macing Christian first after a verbal confrontation.
Nonetheless she was brought in as a prosecution witness (the defense declined to cite her criminal record) and then to give a “victim impact statement” alongside the grieving families of the murder victims, which she used to orate on “white supremacy” and the need to “dismantle this corrupt system”. Having shamelessly inserted herself into the high-profile case the fiery, inarticulate Hester became a minor star in the local BLM grift scene.
This is her testimony before the city council yesterday:
Demetria became a fixture at antifa rallies during the BLM riots. Here she is participating in a “counterdemonstration” against a right-wing rally in February 2020. A small contingent of rally-goers trying to leave downtown are in the parking garage and Hester’s group is manning the exits to harass them as they leave. Hester demands random citizens leaving the garage say “black lives matter” before they can pass (the white woman shadowing her is following antifa practice of whites conspicuously acting as bodyguards for Black! speakers at BLM rallies, as if they might be set upon at any moment by frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacists, in the middle of a BLM rally).
At five and a half hours in an Indian prayer song was offered. It did not appear to drive out the bad medicine:
A homeless man declaring himself “sovereign” was popular with the crowd:
Black! liberal councilman Mingus Mapps was called a “race traitor”.
It wouldn’t be Portland if this guy didn’t show up:
The “queer affinity village” he speaks of above is one of the city’s “Safe Rest Villages” dedicated to “queer” homeless (allowable discrimination, apparently). The SRVs are fenced-in camps of small shacks housing about thirty people. The city plans more of these, along with Ted’s designated campsite Wheelervilles of hundreds.
Some were salty.
Some were sour.
There was plenty of both.
A few came out to support the ban. A newcomer tells of his travails.
A longtime resident says police were unable or unwilling to arrest a violent homeless man in his neighborhood–“the Rock Man” went from shouting at women on the street to hitting one in the head with a rock–because it was “a homeless issue”.
The lone remaining radical on the council offered an amendment withholding funds that was voted down four to one, and the ban is expected to be voted into law.
PDX POV 5.29.23
Oregon Decline Report 5.25.23: You Will Affirm Us
Republicans at the Bridge
Oregon state Republicans are boycotting the legislature to prevent a quorum and inevitable passage of an aggressive “reproductive healthcare” bill requiring insurers to fund all manner of transgender treatment, allowing minors over 15 full access to abortion and “gender affirming” surgery without parental consent and requiring all colleges and universities to maintain facilities providing all reproductive health care, in the Orwellian sense, short of surgical abortion. The bill would also allow providing “reproductive health care information and services to any person without regard to the age of the person”.
[sec. 8 1](b) A physician, physician assistant licensed under ORS 677.505 to 677.525, nurse practitioner licensed under ORS 678.375 to 678.390, pharmacist licensed under ORS chapter 689 or naturopathic physician licensed under ORS chapter 685 may provide [birth control] reproductive health care information and services to any person without regard to the age of the person.
(2) A minor 15 years of age or older may give consent, without the consent of a parent or guardian of the minor, to:
(a) Hospital care, medical or surgical diagnosis or treatment by a physician licensed by the Oregon Medical Board or a naturopathic physician licensed under ORS chapter 685, and dental or surgical diagnosis or treatment by a dentist licensed by the Oregon Board of Dentistry[, except as provided by ORS 109.660].
(b) Diagnosis or treatment by a physician assistant who is licensed under ORS 677.505 to 677.525 and who is acting pursuant to a collaboration agreement as defined in ORS 677.495.
(c) Diagnosis and treatment by a nurse practitioner who is licensed by the Oregon State Board of Nursing under ORS 678.375 and who is acting within the scope of practice for a nurse practitioner.
There are limits to minor consent, of course:
(d) Except when the minor is obtaining contact lenses for the first time, diagnosis and treatment by an optometrist who is licensed by the Oregon Board of Optometry under ORS 683.010 to 683.340 and who is acting within the scope of practice for an optometrist.
Much of the law is about enshrining abortion rights in state law in response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, greatly expanding access to contraception and abortion, shielding doctors in Oregon from lawsuits from other states and, in apparent anticipation, from charges of “assault and battery” for transgender surgery. It mandates colleges and universities maintain extensive contraceptive services and have readily available “morning after pills”, establishing an impressive oversight regime for implementation, mandating annual audits in perpetuity.
(2) No later than April 1 of each year, each public institution of higher education shall submit a plan to the authority. The plan must demonstrate how the institution will ensure its students have access to medication abortions, including having in place equipment, protocols, patient educational materials, informational websites and training for staff.
(3) No later than July 1 of each year, the authority shall determine whether each
institution’s plan submitted under subsection (2) of this section is adequate in proportion to the institution’s capacity to provide services and, if the authority determines that an institution’s plan is inadequate, shall provide further guidance to the institution with remedial measures for developing an adequate plan.
Parents are legally left out of the loop:
SECTION 9. ORS 109.650 is amended to read:
109.650. (1) Except as provided in ORS 192.567, a physician…may not disclose to the minor’s parent or legal guardian information regarding the information and services provided to the minor unless the minor has authorized the disclosure in writing.
(2) A hospital or a physician…may advise [a] the minor’s parent or legal guardian [of a minor] of the care, diagnosis or treatment [of] provided to the minor or the need for any treatment of the minor, without the consent of the minor.
As for runaways, juvenile delinquents and any ward of the state parental consent can be dismissed outright:
418.307. (1) A physician…is authorized to treat a child who is ward of the court or is a dependent or delinquent child in accord with the best medical judgment of the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official of the hospital and without consent if:
(a) Because of the general state of the child’s health or any particular condition, the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official of the hospital determines that in the medical judgment of the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official prompt action is reasonably necessary to avoid unnecessary suffering or discomfort or to effect a more expedient or effective cure; and
(b) It is impossible or highly impractical to obtain consent for treating the child from the child-caring agency, the child’s parent or the child’s legal guardian.
An insurer will be required to accept “[a]ny combination of gender-affirming treatments”:
[sec. 20 (1)](b) “Gender-affirming treatment” means a procedure, service, drug, device or product that a physical or behavioral health care provider prescribes to treat an individual for incongruence between the individual’s gender identity and the individual’s sex assignment
at birth.
(c) “Health benefit plan” has the meaning given that term in ORS 743B.005.
(2) A carrier offering a health benefit plan in this state may not:
(a) Deny or limit coverage under the plan for gender-affirming treatment that is:
(A) Medically necessary as determined by the physical or behavioral health care provider
who prescribes the treatment; and
(B) Prescribed in accordance with accepted standards of care.
(b) Apply categorical cosmetic or blanket exclusions to medically necessary gender-affirming treatment.(c) Exclude as a cosmetic service a medically necessary procedure prescribed by a physical or behavioral health care provider as gender-affirming treatment, including but not limited to:
(A) Tracheal shave;
(B) Hair electrolysis;
(C) Facial feminization surgery or other facial gender-affirming treatment;
(D) Revisions to prior forms of gender-affirming treatment; and
(E) Any combination of gender-affirming treatment procedures.
Cosmetic surgery is taken as gender affirming therefore “medically necessary”, but then all trans surgery is cosmetic surgery, so the logic of including such as “facial feminization” surgery is sound, albeit based on the pseudo science of gender affirmation. The “[r]evisions to prior forms of gender-affirming treatment” locks insurance companies into funding the many corrective surgeries often necessitated by “bottom surgery”, ensuring the continuing growth of the gender affirming surgery market. Who knows what it will cost the insurance industry or, rather, its customers.
The only doctors who can say no to gender treatment are those already working for the trans movement (and not necessarily doctors). Insurers may not:
(d) Issue an adverse benefit determination denying or limiting access to gender-affirming treatment unless a physical or behavioral health care provider with experience prescribing or delivering gender-affirming treatment.
The language appears to be lifted verbatim from similar legislation in Washington state, recently in the news for its new law allowing the concealment of minor runaways and their state-funded treatment from parents who oppose it.
The bill will fund “federally qualified health centers” in “underserved” (and more conservative) rural areas (those areas represented by the Republicans staging the boycott). The centers “may not be limited to reproductive health care”; they will also promote and enable gender transitioning.
SECTION 29. (1) The Office of Rural Health shall administer a program to provide grants to two federally qualified health centers located in rural and medically underserved areas of this state to each operate a pilot project providing expanded reproductive health services to individuals living in a geographical area of this state where there is limited access to reproductive health care.
(2) The grants must include funding for technical assistance in the design and administration of each pilot project and be flexible enough to permit the federally qualified health centers to use mobile health units or other temporary or transitional structures. Grantees must demonstrate that their governance bodies are committed to expanding access to reproductive health services, including abortion, but the services offered in the pilot projects may not be limited to reproductive health care.
(3) No later than September 15, 2025, the office shall report to the interim committees of the Legislative Assembly related to health, in the manner provided in ORS 192.245, on the results of the projects and recommendations for expanding the program to additional areas of this state.
The Republicans are also blocking with their action a gun control measure.
untethered 