Mailbag: Celebrating the arts then and now

I had the distinct honor and privilege of serving as the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s public relations and marketing consultant nearly 40 years ago, and then volunteering to help raise more than $1 million as the original Orange County Performing Arts Center was being built in the mid-1980s. Those were heady days when many of O.C.’s business elite, like Donald Bren, George Argyros, Gen. William Lyon, Henry Segerstrom and Kathryn Thompson, personally knew then-President Ronald Reagan. Not surprisingly, these same corporate titans also were generous supporters of the Newport Harbor Art Museum and OCPAC. Today, many of their heirs have stepped up and become generous donors to the new Orange County Museum of Art. What I find most interesting is what people said decades ago still is being repeated today. There is more to life than making money. There is the creative process we call art. No matter your station in life, it is something we all can celebrate today and decades to come. I wish OCMA a very bright and artful future.

Denny Freidenrich
Laguna Beach

Measure K would change the will of voters

The Costa Mesa City Council’s Measure K is bad politics. It would nullify the 2016 citizens’ landslide vote that approved Measure Y. It would grab the power back from the voters. It would unleash runaway development throughout Costa Mesa.

That Measure K even exists raises a question: What does it take to get through to the Costa Mesa City Council? We told them six years ago in no uncertain terms that we needed to put a leash on them; they had been too free with giveaways to developers.

We created a leash in the form of a citizens’ initiative, which became Measure Y.

It was popular with voters. When we circulated petitions to qualify the initiative for the ballot, some citizens enthusiastically grabbed the clipboard out of the circulator’s hands, wanting to get their name on the petition ASAP.

We knocked on doors. We stood on street corners holding signs. We raised thousands of citizen-only dollars to print flyers and yard signs to explain the issues. We sponsored a civic forum to explain how Measure Y could rein in rash development in our city. We even went to court — and won! — to delete 26 lies and misrepresentations that a council member made in his ballot argument against Measure Y.

Measure Y passed by a landslide: 26,132 in favor and 12,081 against.

Now you might think that the current council of ambitious politicians would learn from the leash-jerking an enraged polity gave the 2016 council.

You also might think that the last thing these ambitious politicians would want to do is poke a majority of voters in the eye. But that’s what they are doing, in effect.

If Costa Mesans want to keep a leash on overly ambitious council members, they should vote “no” on Measure K to save Measure Y.

Tom Egan
Costa Mesa

Katie Porter for reelection

Katie Porter, a former professor from UCI, has become somewhat of a folk hero during her two terms in office representing the 47th Congressional district, which includes Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach. She has become well known for her style of drilling powerful people by questioning them assertively while “scribbling figures on a whiteboard,” a technique reflecting her professorial background. She also has been appreciated as a consumer activist protecting the “little guy” from corporate indifference.

Two of her accomplishments include confronting a pharmaceutical company for hiking the price of cancer drugs and pressing a federal official to make COVID-19 drugs free. She also has been trying to protect Americans’ freedoms from being attacked by the right-wing Supreme Court.

Porter is not afraid to show that she is often politically independent. She even talked Speaker Nancy Pelosi into reversing her opinion on legislation that Porter initiated to prevent lawmakers from trading stocks while in public.

On her Facebook pages, you can see that Katie Porter is appreciated well outside of California. Her opponent is Scott Baugh who led the Orange County Republican Party for several years. According to the Los Angeles Times, if elected, he will join the ranks of “extremist GOP lawmakers.”

Lynn Lorenz
Newport Beach

Voting could sway the future of schools

Two months ago, my family relocated to Orange County after our children were kicked out of their private school in the Bay Area, an ordeal documented by journalist Bari Weiss. As parents, we decided to push back against a divisive and identity-obsessed shift in the curriculum, and administrators told us our objections made faculty and staff feel “unsafe” and informed us our children were no longer welcome on campus.

Six- and 7-year-olds were being asked to share which gender they “felt like” and to pick pronouns that seemed right to them. They were read books about children being “born in the wrong bodies” and were subjected to an identity lecture by a trans-identifying staff member. Older students were asked to join affinity groups based on race, gender identity and/or sexual orientation, and fourth-graders were subjected to sexually explicit health curricula including lessons on sexual orientation and masturbation. American flags were taken down and replaced with pride flags, and civic holidays such as Veterans Day, Presidents Day and Memorial Day were removed from the canon and replaced with identity-based observances such as Black History Month, Indigenous People’s Day, Pride Month and Trans Awareness Day.

When this ideology spread unchecked through our former school, the impact was devastating: Young girls were suffering from body dysmorphia and binding their breasts, white children were dehumanized through curricula that made them out to be oppressors due to the circumstances of their birth and, concerned adults were silenced, shunned and canceled all in the name of “diversity and inclusion.”

The subversive shift at our school was not done in isolation. Accrediting bodies, teachers’ unions and textbook publishers across the country are pushing this ideologically extreme curriculum to schools, both public and private. This orthodoxy is being promoted to school administrators and districts by political activist groups.

In 2019, the Newport-Mesa school district contracted with the Anti-Defamation League to implement identity-based trainings to fight discrimination. Similar trainings were implemented at our former school, and while fashionable, the trainings pit groups against one another in power struggles based on immutable characteristics and ultimately diminish what it means to be human.

There is only one way to rid our school district of this divisive ideology — the ballot box. The incumbent board members who unanimously supported this program for our students must be held accountable and replaced.

I urge Newport Beach voters to consider the following candidates willing to protect our students from a curriculum that dresses itself up as equity and compassion but is rooted in a dim view of human agency that aggravates grievances and divides communities.

Barbara George, running for Area 4, vocally spoke out against the ADL program after it was unanimously approved. Reina Shebesta, running for Area 5, is a school counselor who has committed to vetting the district curriculum for inappropriate and divisive content. Danielle Mills, running for Area 2, is willing to stand up to the special interest groups promoting this controversial curriculum. Lastly, Kristen Seaburn, Area 7, is advocating for a curriculum that is transparent and evidence based.

These candidates are motivated to eliminate the sources of division in our schools and promote a district culture based on fairness with an understanding that every person is a unique individual with value and that we are all united by our shared humanity.

Rebeka Sinclair
Newport Beach

Blue and red get behind Stapleton

We’re so much alike, we joke that we’re sisters from another mother. It’s almost comical how much we’re alike. Though we’re not politically aligned, we put our friendship above politics. We’ve voted differently from the White House to Measure B, but on this one, we’re voting exactly the same, and it’s for Joe Stapleton.

Why would two political opposites agree on a vote for a City Council seat? For us, it’s pretty obvious. Joe has spent years serving the city of Newport Beach and its citizens. He’s respected for his integrity, intellect and work ethic. He cherishes our city and wants to preserve what makes it so special.

Some who spoke so loudly about not wanting to give anyone the ability to buy their way onto the City Council to be mayor are now backing a relative newcomer who is doing just that. We have no animosity towards Joe’s opponent, but he has no track record in our community, other than bankrolling Measure B. That’s anyone’s right to do so, but it’s not a track record of civic leadership, years of building relationships in our community, and a demonstration that one is the type of individual that can lead our city.

The best example of this is the falsehood claiming that Joe was “not being honest” with the O.C. Republican Central Committee when he responded “No” to the question “Have you ever been arrested?” In fact he had not been “arrested” but had been “cited” — two distinct and separate things. Joe was cited for driving his intoxicated friends home while in college from a night of partying. One of the friends had an open container and Joe was cited for it … that is not an arrest.

Newport needs more of what Joe did — to know when to take action to ensure the safety of others. We all know of far too many instances in Newport Beach or of Newport Beach residents who have not had the care of friends like Joe, to ensure they made it home safe and sound. We applaud Joe for doing the right thing ethically and morally … that’s a good friend and a good person, and that’s what Newport Beach needs more of now and always.

So here we are, two good friends … one red, one blue, but both Newport. We both love Newport and we’re both voting for Joe Stapleton for City Council.

Suzanne Gauntlett
Ruth Sanchez Kobayashi
Newport Beach

CCE remains the best option

I’d like to offer my sincerest thanks to reporter Matt Szabo and the editors at the Daily Pilot for making an effort to cover the story of Community Choice Energy in Huntington Beach as well as touching on the ongoing saga of the Orange County Power Authority (“OCPA to provide energy service to H.B.,” Daily Pilot, Sept. 30). ” This story dates back more than five years, and CCE has been discussed, studied and debated before three different versions of the Huntington Beach City Council as well as the crazy world of local social media.

Honestly, the Daily Pilot could have done an entire series of articles focused on Community Choice Energy simply to address the rampant misinformation swirling around our community; an explanation of CCE as a concept and its history would be very helpful in this regard. And with seemingly so much debate about CCE being focused on renewable energy and future environmental benefits, many other community benefits of service go largely unnoticed and unmentioned. I often wonder if my fellow residents even considered that CCE promotes local control/accountability, increased consumer choice/free market competition, and local reinvestment of rate payments. These aspects of CCE are rarely discussed or, in most cases, even mentioned.

While the stand-up and rollout of OCPA has had a number of missteps and administrative “own goals,” these management issues do nothing to undermine the soundness behind CCE’s basic concept: local control and consumer choice.

It is my hope that the residents of Huntington Beach will look beyond the initial OCPA bungles and local disinformation to see the long-term benefits of CCE for our community.

Steve Shepherd
Huntington Beach

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