Dear commissioners: Please leave the legislating to others

Lindsay Berschauer and Mary Starrett

Yamhill County Courthouse

535 N.E. Fifth St., McMinnville, OR

Dear Commissioners:

To quote a line first made famous by Ronald Reagan, patriarch of the conservative movement you’ve so passionately embraced in American politics, “There you go again.”

We refer, of course, to your declaration that you know better than your state and federal superiors when it comes to the age of consent for medical treatment, leaving you free to override them at will. It seems particularly egregious when viewed against the backdrop of your earlier declaration that you also know better when it comes to the regulation of firearms, so are free to impose your judgment there as well.

That’s where the “again” comes in. After all, just scant weeks separate these two dangerous dabblings in ideological overreach.

Let’s set the record straight here:

Commissioner Berschauer, if you recall, your sole bid for state office crumbled in a mere matter of days in 2012, following your revelation of a previous close relationship with former state Rep. Matt Wingard, who was at the center of a sex scandal involving a young aide. And Commissioner Starrett, you surely remember managing a mere 3.6% of the vote in your lone bid in 2006, when you ran for governor on the far right fringe Constitution Party ticket.

You are both free to try again. But in the meantime, you are stuck here in the hinterlands, far from the hub of high-level decisionmaking.

As you should both know, as virtually career politicians and political activists, laws are enacted by state and federal legislative bodies and interpreted by state and federal judicial bodies. There is no role reserved for amateur freelancing by locals holding forth in one of the 3,143 counties scattered across our vast land.

We understand how vehemently you reject curbs on your personal control of your firearms and offspring, even when those curbs were forged through the very processes established for that purpose in the Constitution. You’ve made that abundantly clear.

But the proper venue for redress is the one other-minded people employed in the first place — legislation capable of withstanding judicial scrutiny. It is not, pray tell, idle decrees from on low.

Oregon is one of 31 states establishing an age of consent for medical treatment without parental authorization. It has settled on age 15 in ORS 109.640, a statute not significantly amended since 2012.

Some states have set the bar even lower. For example, Alabama, hardly a bastion of liberal thought, allows minors to seek medical treatment on their own at the age of 14.

And let’s be clear: Treatment includes vaccination against the full gamut of diseases, including COVID.

Whether your objection seems more rooted in opposition to reduced parental control (Berschauer) or just vaccinations in general (Starrett), it makes no difference.

The law is the law. If you want to change it, contact your local legislator.

To demand local officials countermand state or federal law simply on your say is a recipe for potentially ruinous litigation. And to what end?

If you are floating in idle dollars you are dying to spend, how about upgrading some ailing roads, replacing some aging bridges or undertaking any of myriad other concrete improvements begging for forward-thinking investment?

Oregon’s legal community is, by all accounts, doing just fine on its own. It doesn’t need an infusion of Yamhill County tax dollars, particularly when the cause makes tilting at windmills seem the picture of reason.

Thanks in advance for your kind consideration.

Sincerely,

The News-Register Editorial Board