(A News and Sentinel Op-Ed - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

I make it a point not to respond to every provocation that gets tossed into the ether by the likes of fanatical right-wing zealots, but I decided the most recent attempt to get my goat warranted a response. A local authoritarian Christian extremist who routinely expresses his opinion that his beliefs and values are applicable, whether we like, accept or believe them or not, to all people, everywhere, has projected said opinion onto me and the climate action organization for which I am board president. I’ll take the bait this time and give him the attention and acknowledgment he so obviously craves.

Yes, I did mention in a recent WTAP interview that plastics contamination of our oceans has led to whales with stomachs full of such plastics. That was one aspect of my WTAP interview and the climate corner column I wrote and had published in the News and Sentinel recently. I also mentioned that plastics contamination poses numerous human health hazards. I’ll mention in addition here that plastics have been shown to break the blood-brain barrier and have been found in placenta and that a World Wildlife Fund study showed humans consume about a credit card worth of plastic weekly. Those negative human health impacts we’re just starting to learn more about, like endocrine disruption and cancers and disruption to the functioning of bodily organs, are starting even in the womb.

I bring up the womb in particular because the writer to whom I’m responding has accused myself and the rest of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action of being indifferent to abortion procedures because our focus is on climate change as an organization (though he has no idea who even makes up the membership of our organization or what views they hold and clearly a group dedicated to climate action is going to focus on, you guessed it, climate change and not tend to address the public about abortion). I can’t speak for all of our membership but will be happy to speak for myself.

Abortion is healthcare. Period. End of story. There are lots of reasons pregnant people need or want to obtain abortion, none of which are any of my or the writer to whom I’m responding’s business as individuals incapable of becoming pregnant. His beliefs, though this is clearly difficult for him to understand, do not entitle him to violate the bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty of another person via the state or the courts, especially under the former Roe standard before fetal viability outside the womb during which time a fetus is wholly dependent on that person around it called mom for its existence. Mom also has rights and isn’t just a walking, talking feeding tube and incubator.

The accusation of this writer that somehow I’m forcing my views into the lives of others as a method of social control is beyond laughable. I’m sharing the well-established science on the environmental and health impacts of fossil fuels-based polymers, even the effects on those poor soulless whales who have the misfortune of not knowing Jesus (apparently he walked on water but never made it below the surface to explain himself to marine life). Meanwhile, this writer imposes his views on others routinely and swears that all of us who don’t share them will suffer greatly at the hands of his allegedly benevolent deity who is the very constitution of love itself.

Seems to me this deity should care a little more about pediatric cancer wards or the massive and ongoing child sexual abuse being documented in his churches than about abortions. Seems he might also want to do something about climate change, but I guess if it brings about the fire he promises to use to destroy the world again it’s just peachy.

State Sen. Mike Azinger also wrote the paper last week talking about the child endangerment of the dreaded LGBTQ+ agenda! Azinger never hesitates to share his thoughts about what people have going on in their pants. Azinger likes to discuss parental rights but thinks no parent should have the right to decide if their child’s mental health and well-being may be assisted by hormone treatment therapies, dressing differently and/or using different pronouns, despite the fact that medical professionals across the country have concluded that such treatment therapies and sociocultural habits do just that.

Azinger engages in the logical fallacy of hasty generalization to infer that sex transitioning operations are being widely performed on minors and are readily available for performance (no such surgeries have been documented in West Virginia, for example) so the reading public feels the same shock value he felt when reading some books besides his bible.

I’ve studied the sexual mores of the Christian god, Sen. Azinger, and let’s just say I’m not surprised that rampant sexual abuses and improprieties are so common in his churches. The ’60s sexual revolution and the changes it brought were massive improvements over the whole “women and children are objects you can own to be used as you see fit” biblical outlook. To both Azinger and the writer to whom I’m responding I conclude by saying believe what you will, practice your beliefs as you will, but stop trying to force them on the rest of us via our secular institutions and stop projecting your own desires for social control on those you see as enemies and disparage as threats.

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Eric Engle is a Parkersburg resident.