“Under a law expected to go into effect by April, women in California will be able to stop by their neighborhood pharmacy and buy birth control pills without a prescription,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Proponents argue that easing women’s access to birth control will reduce unintended pregnancies, which make up as many as half of all pregnancies nationwide.”

Not everyone cheered the result. “Critics have argued that not requiring a doctors visit to get birth control could reduce the number of women who get tested for STDs and breast cancer,” CBS San Francisco noted. Pro-life advocates have also been uneasy, concerned that allies of abortion providers would use readier birth control access to strengthen their legal and political position.

California’s proximity to Latin American areas affected by the Zika virus, however, spurred Pope Francis to put pro-lifers a bit more at ease. In recent remarks, he “suggested women threatened with the Zika virus could use artificial contraception, saying ‘avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil’ in light of the global epidemic,” the Associated Press reported. “The pope unequivocally rejected abortion as a response to the crisis in remarks Wednesday as he flew home after a five-day trip to Mexico.”

An accelerating trend

With the regulatory changes, the Golden State has positioned itself close to the forefront of a relatively new approach to clearing the use of birth control. “California will become the third state to permit pharmacist-issued birth control once the law, passed in 2013, gains regulatory approval,” the Times observed. “Similar legislation in Oregon was approved last year and enacted in January. Hawaii lawmakers introduced a similar measure last month, and advocates in New Mexico and Alaska say they want to follow suit.” Washington has permitted pharmacist-dispensed birth control for several decades.

The bill behind the law, SB493, was introduced last year by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina. The state pharmacy board had anticipated the law working its way through the Sacramento bureaucracy in time to take effect “as early as Oct. 1,” the Orange County Register reported last June. “The board recently finalized the protocols but they still have to be reviewed by multiple state agencies for legal and budgetary approval.”

Clearing SB493 was not as simple as waving along birth control. The law “also allows pharmacists to prescribe prescription-strength inhalers, gums and lozenges for nicotine addiction, as well as medication for travel abroad, including vaccinations and antibiotics. Along with hormonal contraceptives, these three categories of drugs are considered preventive services for major public health issues,” the Register noted.

Red tape and startups

But a technicality specific to pharmacists’ requirements took an additional toll on getting birth control onto shelves. The approval process “ground to a halt when several doctors and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists questioned whether pharmacists should have to check a woman’s blood pressure, saying the test would be an unnecessary barrier for women,” the Register reported separately last month. “The Obstetricians and Gynecologists group argued that blood pressure can be adequately obtained through self-reporting and that self-reporting would increase access to contraception.”

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has moved on birth control at a characteristically speedy pace. “At a time when users can summon a meal, a massage or marijuana through a smartphone app, Nurx and fellow San Francisco startup Lemonaid Health, as well as a few other companies, are working to make getting hormonal birth control as easy as requesting an Uber ride,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “It’s an evolution of telemedicine to simplify access to some standard prescription drugs, a system designed to appeal to younger people already accustomed to on-demand gratification.”

A growing number of Native American groups are objecting to the pope’s planned Sept. 23 canonization in Washington D.C. of Father Junipero Serra on the grounds that Serra brought devastation to indigenous groups in California after founding nine Catholic missions here, beginning in San Diego in 1775. The protests are expected to intensify throughout the summer, and there are indications that Indian groups will seek support from progressive organizations in trying to make this a national issue.

The latest protest was held July 11 by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in the Mission San Bautista, which is northeast of Salinas. This account is from the San Jose Mercury-News:

“The true history of what happened here has never been told,” tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez told a crowd of about 120 gathered on the grassy field across from the mission.

 

Serra’s Franciscan order “came up with an alibi that missions were a great place” where Native Americans were “taken care of like they were children” because they “wanted a better life,” Lopez said.

 

But that is a fiction, he said, “and you will hear words today that will tell the true story.”

 

That story, he said, includes the fact that more than 100,000 Native Americans died as a result of the trauma inflicted on them by the missionaries, a legacy of wounds that he said continues today.

Protest at Serra’s burial site

A larger, broader protest was held at the cemetery holding Serra’s grave in Carmel on April. 5. This is from the Monterey Herald:

Led by the American Indian Movement, dozens of Native Americans from different tribes from all over California gathered on the Carmel Mission Cemetery for a ceremony to honor their ancestors and their history on one of the most sacred days in the Catholic calendar.

 

The timing and place was chosen because Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded the first nine of the 21 missions in the California system, is buried there. Pope Francis announced in January he would bestow sainthood onto the friar when he visits the United States later in the year.

A smaller protest was held Feb. 1 in downtown Los Angeles a week after the canonization plan was announced, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Hoisting a sign depicting Archbishop Jose Gomez with a toothbrush mustache and a swastika medallion, a dozen people gathered outside Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels downtown to protest the proposed canonization of Father Junipero Serra.

 

Olin Tezcatlipoca, director of the Mexica Movement, an indigenous-rights group, said Serra and the California mission system he founded were responsible for the Spanish “genocide” of native peoples. Gomez, who heads the Los Angeles Archdiocese and has called Serra one of his “spiritual heroes,” refused to meet to discuss the group’s objections, Tezcatlipoca said.

Governor tries to stay above fray

So far, Brown has chosen to try to keep his distance from the issue. In January, he told the Mercury-News, “Father Serra was a very courageous man and one of the innovators and pioneers of California. But there was horrible devastation of the native peoples.” The governor offered no criticism of the pope’s decision.

The argument of some Catholic leaders and defenders of Serra that it is wrong to judge an 18th-century man by 21st-century standards isn’t good enough for activists. “Didn’t they have the Ten Commandments then? Did they teach the golden rule?” one protester told an L.A. Times reporter.

The parallels with the current debate in California and nationally over whether schools and other government property should be named after Confederate leaders are plain.

Senate Bill 539, which would ban the naming of public facilities and roads after Confederates, passed its initial committee vote earlier this month with little opposition.

A play for leadership

Gov. Brown was intent on taking the opportunity to speak more to a national and even local audience than to the planet at large. “With mayors from San Francisco, San Jose and eight other U.S. cities in the audience, Brown gave a glowing review of his own achievements in cutting emissions in California, offering it as a template for mayors around the world to follow,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

But the governor did make plain his ambition that others around the world might look to the Golden State for a blueprint, or at least an inspiration. Well-known as a former Jesuit seminarian, Brown leveraged his reputation to connect up California’s climate policy to the possible policy agenda of Catholics around the world.

“I believe what people at the Vatican are looking for is some hopeful news and reports that yes, climate change can be dealt with,” Gov. Brown told Bloomberg. “My message: that even though this is a very profound and difficult problem, California is showing a way whereby the countries of the world can actually do something very positive.”

He singled out Pope Francis for moving the Catholic church in what many observers have described as a markedly more assertive direction on economic matters. “”I’m very impressed with Pope Francis and where he’s taking the church — I see the hand of Jesuit training and inspiration in what he’s doing,” Brown told reporters with the Contra Costa Times. “The pope is engaging in moral authority and calling people to reflect on the basis of those considerations. This is desperately needed to counteract the iron logic of the marketplace, which is only dealing with profit.”

Gov. Brown emphasized that his Vatican visit was a prelude to the larger United Nations conference on climate change soon to be put on in Paris. “To achieve anything in Paris, we’ll need grass-roots efforts by religious leaders and states and provinces,” he said, “to intensify the pressure on these national leaders to get more done than is currently on their respective agendas.”

Politicking religion

Senate Democrats ensured Brown had a token of appreciation to take with him. SR37, passed with what the Los Angeles Times called near-unanimity, called upon the state to “consider the implications of the papal encyclical and climate change in their policy and fiscal actions to prevent further environmental degradation.”

The bill’s language foreshadowed what top Sacramento Democrats hoped would become a big new raft of state energy regulations. Senate leader Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, has advanced a sweeping piece of legislation drawing some fire, but not enough to blunt its progress. “Oil companies have ramped up opposition,” reported the Times, “and utilities are angling for changes in the bill that would make it easier for them to fulfill requirements to produce renewable energy. But so far, no one has been able to stop the legislation, which has passed the state Senate and is advancing in the Assembly.” De León told the Times “the world is watching what happens in Sacramento very closely.”

The remarkably — but selectively — church-friendly resolution did draw some skepticism. As the Times reported, Sen. Joel Anderson, R-San Diego, “criticized a ‘cafeteria attitude’ to the encyclical, where statements on climate change are endorsed and opposition to abortion is ignored.” As Francis has attracted increasing appreciation from those further to the political left than usually praise the Church, Catholic conservatives have often insisted that his economic views cannot be endorsed in isolation, while other  conservatives nationwide have questioned his economic credentials.

Similar programs have been introduced in nine other states and the District of Columbia.

Originally introduced by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, the bill to issue driver’s licenses regardless of legal immigration status was passed into law in 2013. Assembly Bill 60, the Safe and Responsible Driver Act, permitted the expansion to take effect on the first day of 2015.

As the law specified, recipients did not get licenses identical to those possessed by U.S. citizens. Thanks to the requirements of federal law, the special licenses differed in their visual appearance by being marked, “FEDERAL LIMITS APPLY.” They cannot be used for specified purposes like entering restricted federal areas.

Now, with the process established by the law well under way, Alejo began urging Californians to help eligible recipients take advantage of the program. There, he said, the key is ensuring interested participants actually pass the driving exam.

“It took us 20 years to pass this law in Sacramento, and now that it is a reality, it is up to all our community, not just the legislators, not just the DMV but also organizations in our communities, to take it seriously and put aside the time to study the books, and be able to pass those tests,” he said.

As the Californian reported, in January, “The statewide written knowledge exam passage rate for all applicants for a new driver’s license was 48 percent, including AB60 applicants” — an increase of 1 percentage point over the Jan. 2014 results.

Outsized demand

But other requirements and hurdles kept licenses out of the hands of many undocumented immigrants who wanted them. “Altogether, about 387,000 undocumented immigrants applied for licenses during the first two months of the program, the state said, but only 131,000 were granted them,” according to Reuters. “Immigrants applying for the licenses must still prove their identities with birth certificates or other means,” in addition to passing the driver’s test.

The flood of demand has reflected a growing sense statewide that beneficiaries simply won’t be subject to increased scrutiny at the federal level. Activists in the legal field have adopted a wait-and-see approach.

“The DMV has said they will not refer these cases to law enforcement as long as the person used the license for driving purposes only and did not commit any other criminal activity,” said one San Francisco attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. “We have not yet seen how this policy is playing out, so we are advising people to use caution.”

More organs

Although the licensing program has divided voters in California, where the issue of undocumented immigrants remains sharply unpopular among many residents, beneficiaries of AB60 have scored a public relations coup of sorts thanks to an unanticipated development: increased rates of organ donation.

As the Fresno Bee reported, the California Transplant Donor Network reasoned the law spurred an increase of some 30 percent:

“From Jan. 2 to March 3, 56,000 people signed up as organ donors, according to the donor network, the only federally designated organ recovery organization in Northern and Central California and Northern Nevada.

“‘It’s got to be more than a coincidence that in the past three months — since AB60 took effect — so many people were added to the donor registry, said spokesman Anthony Borders. ‘It’s the only spike that’s happened in the last few years.'”

Although analysts have not yet connected all the dots, some accounts suggested Latinos who immigrated illegally have benefited from clear religious support in opting to donate.

“Recent popes have spoken in favor of organ donations,” the Orange County Register reported. “Pope Benedict XVI was a card-holding organ donor until he became pope, according to the Catholic News Agency. More recently, Pope Francis described organ donations as ‘a testimony of love for our neighbor.'”

Francis is the first pope from Latin America.