Shame on You, Portugal!

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The post was published in one of the Facebook groups for towns and villages surrounding Penamacor in Central Portugal. But it’s only exemplary—it could (probably has been!) posted anywhere and everywhere across Portugal or, for that matter, Spain.

It began with a heart-wrenching photo of a dog.

“Does anyone recognize this dog by any chance?” were the words below it. “Poor boy is skeletal and covered in ticks. We’ve managed to get him in our car and are going to take him to the vet. He’s very scared and also friendly. I’m hoping he’s just lost.”

An update quickly followed: “No chip. The vet gave him a tick tablet. That’s all the vet can do for now, so we desperately need help. Can anybody, please, house him until we are able to sort either a home or sanctuary for him? We’re happy to pay for his dog food, etc.”

A second update was posted: “’Arnie’ slept through the night really well. He didn’t whimper or cry once, nor did he leave any mess. He is now flea- and tick-free and is showing signs of trust. Surprisingly, he hasn’t shown any aggression towards our cat, Bob. Now he has the chance to get healthy and find a family, as he deserves.”

Comments came fast and furious.

“Hundreds of dogs are abandoned here every day,” exclaimed an angry Miguel. “The kennels are full and there are no mechanisms for dealing with these issues.”

The author of the original post replied, “I know, it’s really sad. My partner has been in the kennel life over here, so we are very aware. We are trying to prevent Arnie from going to the Canil, as it’s no life for a dog. Not sure what we are going to do. For now, we will keep him at home, bathe him, and keep our dogs away until we can find somewhere to place him.”

Miguel quickly replied: “There are over 30 dogs in the farm next to mine that are extremely poorly treated. No vaccines, no treatments, no anything. They have so many insects, it looks like a horror movie when you’re close. I’ve contacted every government agency and animal advocacy group in Portugal. No one will do anything.”

He continued, “They keep having puppies and, when they’re older, they abandon them. They barely feed them; so, at night, they get into all the trash in the village and city in order to eat. They’re not neutered, so there’s constantly more. We find dead puppies all the time.”

I cringed when reading this. We, too, had found litters of day-old puppies trashed in the bins of our small village outside Castelo Branco. The first time, only one survived. We brought him home, stopping enroute to buy puppy formula, a couple of light blankets, a hot water bottle, and a toy. We shared responsibilities with Olga, another animal advocate in our village. We kept and cared for him during the days while she was at work. She picked him up on her way home from work and dropped him off with us the next morning. Both of us had other dogs of our own. No matter, this was an imperative. We nursed the baby until he was three weeks old, and his darling eyes had opened. A lovely British family living in a caravan then took him and kept him, ensuring he was properly treated and trained. Not even a month later, Olga knocked on our door. In her hand was a towel covering two tiny puppies her mother had found in another bin in the village. “Can you take him for me, just until I get home from work?” she asked. “We can do what we did last time, until someone who’ll adopt them can be found.” There was no question. Incredibly, the same Brits who adopted our first foundling took both of the babies and fostered them, sharing photos with us as they grew and finally found forever homes with others.

“The government needs to do more,” Tonii, the original poster, replied to Miguel. “This is a serious problem, poor souls. I will never be able to understand and wish I could do more to help!”

“Call the IRA (Intervenção e Resgate Animal),” suggested Jenny, who had joined the conversation. The IRA’s mission is to rescue animals that are victims of mistreatment, negligence, or when their welfare conditions provided for by law are not guaranteed.

Miguel replied, “The IRA told me they won’t respond so far outside of Lisbon and to call the local police. Police won’t do anything. The municipal vet says the kennel is full. That I should build fences. The government doesn’t do anything.”

Condolences and words of support from others began to appear in the comments.

“Thank you for what you are doing for this poor animal. Hope you will find a good home for him; he deserves a better life,” began Kristine.

“Thank you for helping!” echoed Sonja. “Poor thing, that could be the reason why I can’t really live in Portugal. I couldn’t stand the suffering. I would like to support, but I already did for a dog, 200 Euros, then he got hit by a car! I support every month a friend in Morocco. She saves donkeys, horses, dogs, cats. It’s amazing! Wish you all the best with this. Love from Belgium!”

“It is hard, at first it was a big culture shock, and I guess still is,” Tonii told Sonja. “But after living here three years, I know that not every dog you see on the street is a stray. A lot of Portuguese allow their dogs to roam freely here. But when they are in this state, you know they aren’t just roaming … they’re abandoned. It is hard, but please be careful what you say. The other day I was called xenophobic and racist for saying that Portugal needs to get with the times (i.e., education and help from government for poorer communities that can’t afford to neuter their animals). We have brought him home for now. He’s had a bath, some food, and is now resting in the other room. If we had the space (and fewer dogs), I’d keep him in a heartbeat. He’s so gentle.”

“Maybe he’s a lost hunting dog?” Hélia interjected. “The way he is, so skinny, shows that he’s probably been abandoned for a long time.” Jennifer agreed: “Probably a hunting dog left behind. They starve them for months, at least that’s what they do on this island.”

“Hunting dogs are usually chipped as they are worth a fair bit to the owners,” stated Caroline. Arnie wasn’t chipped, though.

“It’s heartbreaking, every time I see a new abandoned dog I want to help; but already having five, it isn’t possible,” shared Julie and several others. 

“Julie, this is how we ended up with 20 … not through choice but found on the streets in terrible condition,” Diane told her. “I know what you mean,” replied Julie, but sometimes you have to draw a line and give the best life to the rescues you already have.”

Portugal and Spain both have laws about mistreating and abandoning animals. As shown here, however, that doesn’t mean they can – or will – enforce them. And woe to the foreigners who intercede on behalf of these misbegotten critters. We’re called out, ridiculed, and told to go back where we came from if this devil-may-care attitude irritates us so much.

After all, it is their culture.

Bruce H. Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine
www.facebook.com/PortugalLivingMagazine

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Remembrances of Things Past

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Lately — for several months now — the church bells in our town and village have been off, ringing randomly, incessantly, and pealing the wrong hours.

What is happening to these bucolic timepieces for which we’ve abandoned wearing watches?

“The bellringer has died and there’s no one to take his place,” we’ve been told. Even the automated, mechanical gongs must be precisely set and adjusted manually. Again, it’s a dying art form–few and far between are the people with the know-how to do it.

Yesterday, as we were walking down one of the town’s shopping streets, my eyes came to rest upon a shoemaker, also known as a cobbler or cordwainer. For fifty years, this professional man now in his seventies has had his shop in the same spot where he fixed and repaired shoes, sandals, slippers, and boots along with a litany of their parts: heels, hooks, eyelets, buckles, and laces. Twice, I had brought the same pair of my favorite shoes to him for new soles. And, hoping he’s still working, I’ll bring them back to him again for a third set. This makes me happy … to enjoy my favorite footwear for many, many years. But, how long can and will he be around? Is there anyone qualified to replace him? More importantly, with the abundance of low-cost, disposable, throw-away foot coverings, do we still need these craftspeople?

It got me thinking about a plethora of things I remember but no longer are around … at least where we live. Undoubtedly, some will disagree and point to these memories which continue to exist where they live (or not far), while others will nod in remembrance but shrug them off as antiquities which have withered in the chain of evolution … survival of the fittest.

In no particular order other than stream of consciousness, here are some of my memories that have faded along with cobblers and church bells:

• Small businesses — mom and pop shops — instead of multinational corporations, tech start-ups, and ubiquitous franchises. Amazon and its ilk have made many obsolete.

• Calligraphy, the art of handwriting, along with classes teaching cursive letters. Who needs them anymore, with the proliferation of word processed fonts?

• Half-hour newscasts rather than round-the-clock commentary and news dumps. In my humble opinion, the obsession with knowing every detail and being up to the minute with constant streams of speculation and (mis)information has contributed significantly to our sense of stress, anxiety, madness, and troublesome vicissitudes.

• Corner candy stores where, unlike today’s sanitized, mass produced, and covered delicacies, the chocolates were handmade and penny candies unfettered.

• Luncheonettes with jukeboxes that have morphed into snack bars and “cafés,” especially here in Spain and Portugal.

• Thrift shops, both old and new. Walmart, Target, E LeClerc, Carrefour, and Todo €1 will never rekindle the charm and romance of Woolworth, McCrory’s, or Ben Franklin stores. In the USA, “upscale resale” businesses are exploding … but here in Spain and Portugal, the natives disdain “used, old things,” unless they’re family heirlooms handed down through generations. Finding genuine thrift and “antique” shops requires both Google Maps and at an hour or two drive.

• The seltzer man. Perhaps local to my New York City upbringing, Louis Arment came weekly to our Queens house, bringing a wooden case filled with a dozen glass seltzer bottles with triggers and a kick. Today, these bottles and boxes fetch a pretty penny at antiques shops. Somehow, today’s “club sodas” can’t replace the fizz of seltzer water.

• Italian-style restaurants, rather than the pizzerias that, as afterthoughts, might serve lasagna, cannelloni, and similar pastas. Yes, I know they’re not “real” (i.e., authentic) Italian, but I hanker for meatballs and spaghetti, antipasto, and chicken parmesan … even if covered with mozzarella cheese not parmesan.

• Soft drinks and milk in glass bottles. We’re drowning in plastics, so why not bring back those beverages in glass bottles? How many youngsters earned extra money beyond their “allowances” by collecting and returning the glass bottles to stores where they received a nickel for each one returned? That was real recycling and well behind its time!

• Telegrams. Reminiscent of World War II, Western Union brought good news, as well as bad. With today’s email, instant and private messages, who needs telegrams anymore? Today, we’re all the messengers who are bound to be shot.

Standing the test of time, vinyl records are making a popular comeback as are comic books, retro style furnishings and clothing, avant-garde architecture, eyeglasses, and keepsakes.

Maybe we’re yearning for simpler times in nostalgia, when neighbors were friends, civics and penmanship were taught in our schools, and history wasn’t engulfing us and passing us by. When artificial intelligence meant using CliffsNotes rather than reading the books.

If you haven’t seen Pleasantville, go have a look.

Bruce H. Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine, the thoughtful daily online periodical for people everywhere with Portugal on their minds.
www.facebook.com/PortugalLivingMagazine

Olvera’s Pride

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Olvera, our getaway home in southern Spain for the past 18 years, has plenty to be proud about … not the least is its designation – honored by a Spanish postage stamp – as Spain’s “Best Rural Destination” in 2022. The town of 8,500 straddles the intersection of Cádiz, Sevilla, and Málaga provinces.

Outside its town hall fly the flags of Olvera, Cádiz, Spain … and a rainbow flag.

Now, I just learned another reason for Olvera to be proud: On June 23rd, it will be hosting a Gay Pride event for its residents and guests.

Spain is said to be the first European country and the second in the world with more LGBT+ people, according to a study by Ipsos, which holds a 4.2 out of 5-star rating on Trustpilot with over 45,695 customer reviews. Spain is designated as the third country in the world that most supports the right to equal marriage. And, like Portugal, Spain protects LGBT rights and validates the “diversity of the collective.” The survey also corroborates that Spain is a country in which there is majority support for proposed measures to improve the integration of trans people, a country that embraces “diversity, freedom, and LGBT+ pride … that advances by leaps and bounds without (a) brake.”

According to the survey, “Spain is where respondents are most likely to say they are gay or lesbian (6%), while Brazil and the Netherlands are where they are most likely to say they are bisexual (both 7%). Japan is the country they are least likely to identify as either gay or lesbian (less than 1%) and as bisexual (1%).”

The Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal are known for their inclusiveness.

Like Lisbon and Porto, Madrid and Barcelona have huge Gay Pride celebrations and marches each year. Events honoring LGBTQI+ people take place in other major Spanish cities, too: Sevilla, Córdoba, and Torremolinos … as well as such gay-renown destinations as Ibiza, Sitges, and Benidorm.

But Olvera?

One of the “pueblos blancos” in the province of Cádiz, Andalucía, Olvera has much to commend—including its positive attitude toward sexual minorities that are marginalized and condemned elsewhere.

Of late, think Uganda. In fact, 64 countries (nearly half in Africa, including Nigeria) have laws that criminalize homosexuality. In the USA, the political right is bound and determined to introduce legislation that eliminates or rescinds LGBT social and constitutional rights gained only after centuries of exclusion and damnation.

So, it behooves “queer” people to call attention to their history of cruelty, mistreatment, and entrapment, along with its contributions to civilization at large in countries like Spain and Portugal where gay rights are endorsed and supported.

We learned about the June 23rd event over lunch from two female friends, a kitchen designer and her retired spouse. They knew the date and location it was to take place – in a public square on the main street of town, directly opposite the Iglesia de la Victoria, one of Olvera’s pristine churches – but not the time.

I thought about the LGBT people we are acquainted with in Olvera who might be there:

> The beautiful young man with sometimes pink dyed hair who owns an upscale furniture shop and has won multiple awards for his interior designs—commercial, residential, and dressing the windows of local shops;

> The male couple who live down the block of our former house who enjoy a long-distance relationship, spending time together in Olvera, Australia, and elsewhere;

> The respected and educated man of magnificent color who lives, for now, in Olvera but spends each month working in London;

> The adorable waiter at our favorite restaurant who I’ve been innocently teasing and playfully flirting with for several years;

> The reclusive couple living two doors from ours but won’t speak to us, for whatever their reasons;

> The tall, dark, and steamy recent arrival from Venezuela whose eyes locked with mine momentarily;

> The lady in red who – rumor has it – enjoys her bread buttered on both sides;

> The British couple who lived here for several years, opening and closing a few businesses before returning to England … but continue to visit time and again;

> The colorful youngsters with ink covering their bodies and piercings from lip to nose. Maybe they are the “Q’s” in the increasingly complex jargon of LGBT syntax.

We Americans tend to be more priggish when it comes to carnal matters than the Mediterranean peoples. Sex is sex to them, nothing more and nothing less … without getting into issues of gender identity or sexual branding. They’re much more comfortable with themselves and their bodies. It’s not unusual for men to have slept with other men or women with women. Passion isn’t scrutinized or sanitized to subvert the prurient interest. The heat of the moment doesn’t result in being branded with a homophobic scarlet letter. Lust and sex between consenting adults are considered normal. It is what it is.

Pride, however, is all about identity … about standing tall in society without apologizing or denying who we are. If it’s a moment to be silly, too, so be it.

Gay Pride also satisfies something we seriously miss when living abroad: a sense of community … of people like us that transcends individuals and friendships, regardless of where we are on Kinsey’s scale and spectrum.

It’s also an occasion for friends and allies to stand together with us.

If we’ve learned anything from the Trump years and thereafter, it’s as Streisand sang: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. We’re children, needing other children. And yet letting a grown-up pride hide all the need inside, acting more like children than children.”

You bet we’ll be there at Olvera’s Gay Pride!

Bruce Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine. Follow the magazine daily at www.facebook.com/PortugalLivingMagazine. It’s free!

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So Be It …

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It is without shame, guilt, regret, or apologies that I acknowledge:

• I will never be Portuguese, no matter what I do or how hard I try.

• I will always be a foreigner living in Portugal. Even with permanent residency and Portuguese citizenship, I will still be an outsider who has been allowed in.

• Belonging, however, is different. After five years, I really do feel a sense of belonging here–that I have adapted to my habitat and that it has adopted me.

• Whether I like it or not, I cannot help but interpret what’s happening around me through the lens of my personal upbringing and cultural heritage. This may or may not be a good thing.

• Things are done differently here. I need to take deep breaths and exercise my patience when I do everything correctly but the “system” malfunctions or the bureaucracy balks.

• I am an immigrant residing in Portugal with no intention of moving “back home” (or anywhere else). Others who live here for a time and/or a reason, but plan to move on, are the only real expats.

• I will never speak Portuguese as the natives do. But I can strive to communicate with others in myriad situations and to do my best to understand the people’s language.

• Out of respect and interest, I participate in Portuguese holidays, ferias, other events and rituals; but I’m engaged without being able to fully feel, appreciate, or identify with the spirit and soul — the “why” — behind some cultural customs and traditions.

• It is because of my homeland that I can live as I do in Portugal.

• Although I have left my homeland to live abroad in Portugal, I can never cut the umbilical cord that ties me to whence I came. I vote from abroad here and care what happens there.

• While I live in the midst of Portuguese people, my lifestyle is probably different from theirs. I can afford big and little luxuries — air conditioning, a modern kitchen, extra bedrooms, a new car — that many of them can’t. It behooves me to be sensitive to this difference.

• Whenever possible, I try to buy locally … without disrupting, depriving, or displacing the Portuguese people or their land.

• Because I benefit from residing in Portugal — health care, education, elder care, etc. — I contribute to the country’s Social Security … even though, because of my age and limited years of contributions, I’ll never qualify for even the most minimal of pensions.

• I am but a guest here, yet I do have a right to abhor malevolent practices–from abandonment, abuse, or neglect of domestic animals to charging different prices for foreigners and native locals.

• For whatever their reasons, some people decide that Portugal is not for them and leave the country. It is incumbent upon me to be empathetic and understanding, not snide or sarcastic, about the life they choose to pursue elsewhere–whatever and wherever it may be.

Bruce H. Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine.

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Justice League of America

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Article III, Section 1:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

The U.S. Constitution provides for a Judicial Branch including one supreme Court. It also appears to assume that the Supreme Court will include a Chief Justice, stipulating that the Chief Justice shall preside over any Presidential impeachment trial in the Senate. However, the Constitution is silent on other matters, such as the size and composition of the Supreme Court, the time and place for sitting, and the Court’s internal organization … leaving those questions to Congress.

In addition to setting the size of the Supreme Court, Congress also has determined the time and place of the Court’s sessions, as well as the salaries of its justices. Supreme Court decisions establish that the Exceptions Clause grants Congress broad power to regulate the Court’s appellate jurisdiction.

Annual pay per justice as of January 1, 2023, is $274,200 … except for the chief justice, who receives $286,700.By no means paltry sums.

The Supreme Court currently comprises nine justices: the Chief Justice of the United States and eight Associate Justices. The justices are nominated by the president and confirmed with the “advice and consent” of the United States Senate, per Article II of the United States Constitution.

Congress also has significant authority to determine what cases the Court has jurisdiction to hear. The Constitution only grants the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over the relatively narrow categories of Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party.” In all the other Cases subject to federal jurisdiction, Article III grants the Court appellate Jurisdiction … with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as Congress shall make.

According to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Like all Federal judges, Supreme Court Justices serve lifetime appointments on the Court, in accordance with Article III of the United States Constitution.”

Show me, please, where it says that in the Constitution.

As with guns, words – i.e., “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – have been taken out of their original (and implied) context and prostituted to assume other, subsequent meanings.

Take corruption, for instance.

Corruption may involve many activities including bribery, influence peddling and embezzlement. Political corruption occurs when an officeholder or other governmental employee acts with an official capacity for personal gain.

Which brings us to where we find ourselves today.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing more questions about his finances, with a new report about thousands of dollars of income he’s reporting from a real estate firm with ties to his wife, Ginni Thomas. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas reported rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, The Washington Post reported.

That Nebraska firm no longer exists, having been closed 17 years ago.

The latest revelation about problems with Thomas’s legally-required financial disclosure forms raises questions about how seriously he took his obligation to disclosure his finances to the public. Public officials are required to fill out such forms to show if they have any conflict of interests between their personal finances and public duties.

Thomas is facing calls for an investigation and his resignation.

The supreme court justice claims he was advised that he did not have to disclose luxury trips paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow because Crow and his wife are “personal friends,” said Thomas in his first statement on the matter.

Before then, conservative activist Ginni Thomas has “no memory” of what she discussed with her husband during the heat of the battle to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to congressional testimony.

Ginni Thomas recalled “an emotional time” in which her mood was lifted by her husband and Mark Meadows, then Donald Trump’s chief of staff, a transcript of her deposition with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol shows. Thomas has been a prominent backer of Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

At 74, her husband is the oldest and most conservative member of America’s highest court, which has played a crucial part in settling disputed elections.

Speaking of wives of the supreme court justices, two years after John Roberts‘s confirmation as the Supreme Court’s chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot: After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was the highest-ranking judge in the country. “There are many paths to the good life,” she said. “There are so many things to do if you’re open to change and opportunity.”

And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least between 2007 and 2014.

During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated $10.3 million in commissions paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistle-blower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that, as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms that practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation to the Supreme Court was embroiled in controversy when multiple women accused him of sexual assault. One of them, Christine Blasey Ford, testified before Congress about the alleged attempted rape she suffered at his hands in high school. The 2023 film Justice is a horrifying and infuriating inquiry into those claims, told largely by friends of Ford, lawyers and medical experts, and another of Kavanaugh’s alleged victims: Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of his at Yale.

Most damning of all, it features a never-heard-before audio recording made by one of Kavanaugh’s Yale colleagues—Partnership for Public Service president and CEO Max Stier—that not only corroborates Ramirez’s charges but suggests that Kavanaugh violated another unnamed woman as well.

As Democrats remember with still smouldering fury, when Mitch McConnell was majority leader, he refused to grant Merrick Garland–now Attorney General of the United States–even a token hearing after he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in March 2016 to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s seat. The day Garland was tapped, McConnell declared, “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.”

Garland was never granted a hearing, a slap in the face to democracy and to America’s first black president.

Another supreme court justice, Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.

Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973. His draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.

A nearly $2 million sale of property co-owned by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to a prominent law firm executive in 2017 is raising new questions about the lax ethics reporting requirements for Supreme Court justices.

Property records from Grand County, Colorado, show that the Walden Group LLC–a limited-liability company in which Gorsuch was a partner–sold a 40-acre property on the Colorado River to Brian Duffy, chief executive officer of the prominent law firm Greenberg Traurig. Duffy and his wife, Kari Duffy, paid $1.8 million for the property on May 12, 2017–just one month after Gorsuch was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

The financial disclosure report filed by Gorsuch for calendar year 2017 lists a sale by the Walden Group LLC for a profit of between $250,000 and $500,000. However, the section where a buyer should be listed is blank. It’s unclear if that’s a violation of ethics rules.

And, so, these questions and doubts beg to be settled by Justice League overseers.

The Justice League is an all-star ensemble cast of established superhero characters from DC Comics’ portfolio. Although these superheroes usually operate independently, they assemble as a team to tackle especially formidable villains.

The cast of the Justice League usually features a few highly popular characters who have their own solo books, such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, alongside a number of lesser-known characters who benefit from the exposure. The Justice League was created to boost the profiles and sales of its characters through cross-promotion and helped to develop the DC Universe as a shared universe, as it is through teams like the Justice League that the characters regularly interact.

Beyond comic books, the Justice League has been adapted to several television shows, films, and video games included.

More recently, it has been shadowing the United States Supreme Court.

MEO & Me

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There are some bureaucracies that frustrate me.

Others annoy and make me angry.

MEO – the largest telecommunications provider in Portugal – belongs to the latter.

So, when I read that MEO has been hit with a €2.46 million fine imposed by Portuguese media regulator Anacom, which found that MEO had violated rules applicable to the termination of contracts on the initiative of subscribers … nor had it confirmed complaints about contracts submitted by customers … and also provided incomplete information on the means and contacts available for submitting termination requests, I cheered.

Because my household and I are among MEO’s most recent victims.

Did you know that once your “loyalty period” (fidelização) – usually 24 months – is over, you are free to change companies and/or plans. Whichever offers you the most for the least.

At the time, our bills for both houses were totaling 140-150€ per month.

We trekked over to the large MEO store in the Forum shopping center, only to learn that its function is only to sell MEO packages and products. We couldn’t discuss the better terms we had seen advertised, nor could we cancel, change, or remove a second móvel which we no longer used, from our account. That would have to be done by phone, the salesman informed us, asking for a good time to have a customer service representative contact us. We could negotiate a better deal during the call.

“Will whoever calls speak English?” I asked. My faltering Portuguese was substantial to engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, and talk to my doctor and pharmacist face-to-face. But over the phone? No way.

“No,” replied the salesman. “But you can ask to speak to someone who does speak English. Can you do that—ask to speak to someone who speaks English?”

I nodded and agreed to receive a call from MEO at 4:00 pm that afternoon.

“Be certain to answer the call,” the salesman warned, “you will only receive that one call from MEO.”

Sure enough, at 4:30 (Portuguese time), the call came from MEO.

“Posso falar com um empregado que fale inglês?” I asked.

“Sim senhor. Mas ela precisará ligar de volta para você. Está ocupada falando com outro cliente no momento.”

I agreed. After all, what other choice did I have.

Twenty minutes later, an English speaking MEO customer service rep rang me up. We spoke for about 20 minutes, and she seemed to understand exactly what I wanted. Now, how much would the two plans – we had one for each house – cost? She asked if she could put me on hold while plugging all the data into her system to determine the monthly charges. “Only if you don’t disconnect me,” I replied, having experienced the agony of being cut off, of being disconnected, and trying to reach that same person again. “No worries,” she assured me. “If anything should happen, I will call you right back.”

She called back within a few minutes and ran through the numbers with me. Bottom line: For the two plans with the services we wanted, the total cost amounted to €104. A substantial savings over what we had been paying. She told me that, within an hour, I would receive the contracts for both properties in my email. All I needed to do was to click on the “Validate” button to create new contracts and cancel my former ones.

The contracts came, albeit with slight discrepancies from what we had discussed. The one for our second house at €29.99 was fine … but the bigger, main package linked to our principal residence was eleven euros more than she told me, bringing the total monthly cost to €111—not that great a savings.

Frustrated, I Googled “Portugal Internet Plans” and discovered NOWO, a company being bought by Vodafone that currently lags behind MEO, NOS, and Vodafone. Based on its advertising, NOWO appeared to be the best value in terms of our needs: For 90€ per month, NOWO would provide us with 1 Gbps with 360° coverage, a TV package including all the channels we watched (or wanted to), four TV boxes, 5,000 minutes or SMS on our móvel, a fixed telephone line with 9,000 minutes nationally and 1,000 minutes internationally at our two locations.

That would amount to a savings of at least fifty euros (50€) per month.

The next morning, we headed over to the one (and only) NOWO store in Castelo Branco. The lone salesperson was lovely—friendly, outgoing, helpful, and alternating her English with my Portuguese. Unfortunately, NOWO wouldn’t work for us; it had no broadband (fiber) service available at our home in the Alentejo and the best it could do for us in Alcains was to provide half the speed we currently have. She was as disappointed as we were.

“Before you go,” she asked, “would you mind if I take a look at the contracts that MEO proposed?”

Seeing no reason not to, I handed them to her. She looked at the first contract—the €29.99 monthly service to our second property, in Alentejo. “This looks fair and reasonable,” she nodded. “Let me take a look at the other one,” the bigger bill assigned to our primary residence in Castelo Branco.

“€81.89 per month,” she questioned, shaking her head negatively. “That’s way too much. You shouldn’t be paying more than 60€ or so for this package.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” I asked.

“Yes. Go to the MEO store a few doors down and show them this contract. Tell them that there must be a mistake to pay so much … “

That’s what we did.

The gal behind the counter took one look at the €81.89 contract proposal and made a series of faces ranging from curiosity to incredibility. She hit a key on her computer which, in turn, caused something to print out. It was a flyer and she handed it to me. Evidently a major mistake had been made by someone.

Except for a second MEO TV box (€2.99/month), everything included in that €81.89 was also included in her offer for €56.99!

Between the two houses, our monthly MEO bill would be 50€ less than we’d be paying. Exactly what we were hoping for. Yes, ma’am, we’ll take it.

If only life with MEO were so simple.

We had two choices: Either cancel our current contract and sign up for this plan under my partner’s name (MEO wouldn’t allow it to be put in my name). Or receive another call from MEO’s negotiating team and renegotiate.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we decided to renegotiate.

Again, the MEO store employee made all the arrangements for an English-speaking negotiation agent to contact us at a given time with all of our particulars. Including the mistakes made by the previous agent. She was quite pleasant and accessed our previously proposed contract. “You spoke with Carmen, is that correct?” she asked. That was correct, as were all the other details she had about us, our dealings with MEO, and even information about our discussions with the latest salespeople we had spoken with at the MEO store.

“And you want to renegotiate your contract?” she confirmed. “Exactly,” I replied. “We want the €56.99 package MEO is offering.”

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

Over the next ten minutes, she came back several times, thanking me for my patience and saying she needed just a few more minutes. Finally, she came back on the line prepared with an offer: “I cannot give you that €56.99 package. The best I can do is to give you the same package for 66€.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why can’t you give me the same package for the same package that the MEO store can give.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not in my script. I cannot offer that price to you.”

“MEO is giving me no choice but to cancel my contract and write a new one under my partner’s name at the MEO store,” I argued.

“You certainly can do that,” she agreed. “But then, you would lose all of the MEO points you have earned—18,444 so far.”

MEO points? I’d never heard of them before. What were they?

“For each euro you pay to MEO, we give you one MEO point. You can use these points to purchase many items … from telemóvels to small and large appliances and many other valuable items.  Just look at everything you can choose from on the MEO website. For a difference of nine euros each month, is it worth giving up all your MEO points? They’re non-transferrable. If you accept my offer, the points will stay with you and be transferred with your new contract. If you cancel your current contract and go with the one offered at the MEO store, you will lose all your points.”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll take a look at what’s available on your website.”

“No problem,” she said. “But before we can do anything in either case, we will need to remove your second móvel, which you no longer use or want, from your account before we can proceed.”

“Is that something I can do now with you?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “We have a separate department that handles removals of specific services contained in your contract. If you hold on briefly, I will transfer you to that department. I will also send them all the details we’ve discussed.”

“Will the person you transfer me to speak English?” I continued.

“I cannot say for sure,” she said. “But you can ask to talk with someone who speaks English in that department.”

“Okay, go ahead and transfer me.”

The person on the other end spoke rapid-speed Portuguese, but no English. I understood what she was telling me, though: The English speaker in this MEO department was currently engaged with another customer. But she would call me back within the hour. I confirmed that she had all my correct contact and account information. She did, repeating my name, phone number, and contract ID to me in Portuguese. Yes, all the information was correct.

While waiting for the call back, I meandered through MEO’s website “store.” There really wasn’t anything we needed … but, who knows, we could have taken advantage of our points and redeemed them for products. Discovering how the point system worked was another exercise in futility. While we earned one MEO point for each euro we paid MEO, it didn’t work that way with purchases using points. Much like my Travel Rewards credit card, each point earned didn’t equal one euro to spend. One hundred points earned equaled one euro to spend. So, my 18,444 MEO points were worth €184.44. Sure, nothing to sneeze at. But was it worth it? Especially given all the grief MEO already had put me through?

The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was that the designated English speaker from MEO’s service “removals” department never called back. We waited three days. No calls from MEO, nor even a new contract in my email.

Despite my annoyance, this whole round-and-round-we-go had become a matter of principle for me by now. My partner and I agreed that the MEO points be damned. We would cancel our contract and sign up for a new one under his name. Doing so would achieve our overall goal: to reduce our monthly MEO bills substantially. We’d be saving over fifty euros each month, even if we had to go through the motions and inconvenience of bringing our routers and MEO boxes into the store to cancel our account and having MEO’s technicians schedule a time to come and bring us other ones. No installation work was needed … just bringing us a new router and two MEO TV boxes.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I told the gal at the MEO store. “We already have the router and boxes in place, working fine. Why not let us keep them instead of playing this ‘musical MEO’ with our time and equipment?”

She shrugged. I guess she didn’t get the reference to American “musical chairs.”

But I was reminded of that quintessential refrain: “Once, shame on you; twice, shame on me.”

P.S. Despite the machinations involved in dealing with MEO—and, I suspect, its brothers in arms—one of the customer service reps I spoke to gave me a good piece of advice: Once your “loyalty” period has ended, check the offers MEO (or NOS, Vodafone, NOWO) are offering, which change every month. You could end up saving a bushel and a peck!

Bruce Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine.

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Inside-Out Voices

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Back in the day parents, teachers, and caretakers would warn or advise their kinfolk (typically children) to “use your inside voice” when they were becoming too loud.

Even outside.

Described as a modulated, relatively calm voice considered polite and socially appropriate when speaking indoors (at home, in school, or at the office), an inside voice is opposed to an outside voice: the latter a strong, elevated voice considered acceptable when speaking outdoors to be heard above a crowd or other background sounds.

Inside or out, an inside voice means that you’re thinking about the eardrums of others and that you know how to communicate without hollering.

Such is not the case in Spain.

Spain is loud.

People — especially women — tend to use their outdoor voices everywhere and all the time. Especially in the streets and right outside their front doors. That’s where they socialize. The streets are their living rooms, reception areas to interact and communicate.

Perhaps that’s because, for the most part, houses in Spain (and Portugal) were built with spaces too small to accommodate gatherings and inside voices. So people, their families, and neighbors congregate in the street, speaking up without realizing how loud is their talk.

My grandmother looked down on the street (although she also disapproved of jeans and bell bottoms, popular at the time). She came from money, married into more, and lived in a 12-room apartment on the fourth floor of Madrid’s prestigious Salamanca barrio (neighborhood). There was plenty of room for guests to gather in one of her several sitting rooms. “Sólo los Fulanos de tal se quedan por las calles” (Only nondescripts stay out on the streets), she would say.

Of course, those were the days of Francisco Franco, “caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios” (leader of Spain by the grace of God), according to the coins, when one never used outside voices while walking the streets patrolled by stern faced guardia civil with firearms.

So, maybe using outside voices is a social thing learned from childhood: to be heard over one’s male siblings and family members, girls tend to lift up their voices. It could be, too, that screaming and screeching are learned and reinforced on unsupervised toddlers when they’re ignored rather than disciplined for running amok and yelling at the top of their lungs in supermarkets and other public places, where inside voices are expected.

Spain is loud, a country of outside voices and sounds.

Facing us on the same street is a family comprising a middle-aged woman, her elderly mother, a twenty-something young man without work and living at home, and two very young grandchildren. A husband appears periodically. From early morning until what we consider late at night (10:00 pm), they are in their doorway using loud, outside voices.

And it’s not only them.

Some women, especially, terrify our dogs with their loud, high-pitched voices. Men, too, project their bass and baritone tenors decibels beyond normal hearing levels. Sometimes, we’re not certain whether they’re having a heated argument or just an everyday discussion … so we mind our business and don’t get involved. Due to the often industrial nature of their workplaces, men can be heard using outside voices inside.

Why do the Spanish shout when talking?

Sometimes, people may shout to be heard. This is not necessarily rude but indicates full engagement with the discussion. One often hears Spaniards call out and even heckle during speaking engagements and performances. This is expected to be taken in jest.

“I live in Madrid and share a flat with a few Spaniards,” says Sofía. “It depends on the crowd, to be honest, but I found that Spanish girls in particular tend to get pretty loud, even for me (Italian f). I used to live in Germany before moving to Spain and I am not surprised to find the difference in decibels a bit jarring.”

Nuno, a Spaniard, responds: “We love being loud. Loud means friends. Loud means fun. Loud means interesting. Loud means fiesta. There’s nothing worse than a silent bar.”

Spain is a loud country.

The bread man leans too long on his horn during his morning runs up and down the streets. Machismo throttling of motorcycles going the wrong way on one-way streets is deafening, as if the whine of the loudest motors denotes riders with the biggest cojones (or vice-versa). The vendors at the outdoor market bark as part of their sales routine. Even the rumbling of cars with diesel engines momentarily stopped albeit beating and belching — along with their fumes — are enough to disturb the peace. Heck, there’s even slang in Spanish (ruidoso/a) or (escandaloso/a) to describe the noise. Language textbooks make note of Spain’s noise:

• Mike didn’t like going to the city because it was always so noisy.
A Miguel no le gustaba ir al centro porque siempre era muy ruidosa.

• María was happy when school started because the noisy children were gone for a while.
María estaba contenta cuando empezaron las clases porque los niños ruidosos se irían por un rato.

Excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance, and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behavior. According to research by the American College of Cardiology, noise pollution is linked to an increase in cardiovascular problems. The stress of constant noise results in the more frequent release of cortisol — the infamous stress hormone — which damages blood vessels.

Noise has emerged as a leading environmental nuisance in the WHO European Region, and the public complains about excessive noise more and more often.

The noise levels in Spain are generally a little higher than one might find in other countries. In fact, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the only country higher on the decibel tables worldwide is Japan.

No matter where or when, Spain is loud.

“It doesn’t matter what time it is, or what type of environment. I have been having breakfast at 8:00 am in a restaurant with Brits and Swedes and there is conversation. I can make out every word they say from across the room … until one Spanish family arrives,” shares a Brit. “They arrive at the table with their speaker phones on because, apparently, they think I need to hear both sides of their loud conversation. And they ignore their children to the point that the kids are screaming for attention. When they do decide to acknowledge the kids, they scream even louder.”

Attempting to sound a bit more diplomatic, I’ve often said that the Portuguese evidence more soul, while the Spaniards are more spirited.

Nonetheless, much as I have been tempted to (nicely) ask a Spaniard to speak more softly, I remind myself that I am an expat for a time in their country. I have no right to intrude on their culture … or communication modus operandi, for that matter.

Yet, even foreigners are entitled to a fair share of accommodation and hospitality …

Last night, I was awakened after midnight by the voices of a man, his young son, and their dog cavorting in the street in front of our house. The ruckus continued for more than half an hour, awakening my dogs who began barking. Finally, I went to the window and said, “Es medianoche. Cállense, por favor” (It’s midnight. Please be quiet.).

And, no, I didn’t use my inside voice.

Bruce Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine.

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Editorial: Phone-y Magazines

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Our options for reading entertainment and enjoyment grow fewer and farther between.


There’s always been competition: Look v. Life, Time v. Newsweek, People v. Us, The Saturday Evening Post v. Reader’s Digest, Ladies Home Journal v. Good Housekeeping, National Geographic v. Smithsonian, Playboy v. Penthouse, et al.


Yet only the strongest survived.


And even then, only after a fashion.


Gone, by and large, are in-depth stories and original narratives, replaced by “posts,” catchy photos with captions, and different spins on the same subject matter cluttering our lives.


Time – or our lack thereof – is one of the major thieves of being engaged in a magazine. Reader’s Digest realized that in its condensed versions of bigger magazine pieces. Heck, even Cliff Notes and Classics Illustrated understood that we had other things to do with our time than read long-time classics.


Magazines filled a niche, appealing to our special interests, creating communities of like-minded people who read what most interested them specifically—including the ads. Indeed, magazines were one of the first media to sell advertising targeting consumers by psychographics as well as by their demographics.


Few take the time today to appreciate the balancing act that comprise magazines.


Like newspapers and newsletters, they’re periodicals published at given intervals … most often weekly, monthly, or that frequency reserved for the realm of magazines: fortnightly.


But unlike their brethren, they weren’t designed to be all things to all people or to cover some subjects to many. Nor were they constrained by geographic boundaries or time-sensitive data. You could leave a good magazine on your bedside night stand or beside the bathroom throne, eager to thumb through its pages and pick up where you left off.


Newspapers came to us in sections – national and international, local, sports, entertainment, classified advertising – while magazines, like sandwiches, were divided among columns and departments, with features filling the well in between. For their part, newsletters were a mishmash of topical content condensed into four to 16 pages.


“All the news thats fit to print,” the slogan of the New York Times, is perhaps the most famous phrase in American journalism. Words dominated images, cramming as much information as possible onto the front page. And if an article didn’t fit in the space allotted, it “jumped” to a page farther on back. It took People magazine to rethink the anatomy — down to the fonts (sans serif “Helvetica” rather than more formal “Times”) and type faces — and using more expensive color photography only on the cover and paid advertising, with black and white the editorial mainstay.


Along came the Internet and challenged all that …


If newspapers, magazines, and newsletters wouldn’t give up the ghost to be swallowed and spit out in bits and bytes – numbers! — they could try, at least, to exist side-by-side boosting their namesakes. Especially if they (or parts of them) were free.


Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by search engines, taught Madison Avenue money managers that, “the key to getting more traffic lies in integrating content with search engine optimization and social media marketing.”


There it is, folks: Publishers want traffic and numbers rather than readers and loyal subscribers. No longer does it matter who reads an article, editorial, even comic strip, but how many people search for it and (best of all!) “click through,” scanning the first words.
Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing web pages to increase a website’s visibility “organically” in the search engine result pages (SERPs).


SEO is completely different from search engine (paid) advertising. With paid advertising, you’re paying search engines like Google to show your website on the search result page. Instead, with SEO, you’re optimizing your website so it organically shows up on the first page of the search result. The number of visitors who come to your website through these search results is defined as organic traffic (because they found your website themselves).


Imagine that!


Portugal Living Magazine used Facebook advertising to increase its own numbers: reach (how many people saw the ad) and engagement (how many people clicked and responded to it). An ad reaching 3,402 people in our defined audience, for instance, reached 2,131 through a mobile app feed and 593 from an Instagram feed. The other 679 came from a slew of sources.


To promote our website, a more aggressive ad on Facebook reached 19,200 people: 211 engaged, 198 clicked on the link, and 13 reacted. Cost per click: €0.08. And where did they see the ad itself? Three-quarters (73%) or 12,888 viewed it via a mobile app, while slightly more than a quarter (27%) or 4,776 saw our ad on the right hand side of their desktop.


When three-fourths of the population see information on a mobile application compared to one-fourth who see it elsewhere, there’s no question that we are a mobile society. We depend on our mobiles not only to make calls and send messages or to get directions and seek answers to questions, but to read and watch on those miniscule screens. Witness the success of Amazon’s Kindle and other computerized “pads” especially designed for reading.


I’ll briefly share how that impacts a 100+ page magazine like Portugal Living Magazine next.

For now, let’s just say that magazines are migrating to websites, where they’re configured quite differently for readers, writers, publishers, and advertisers.


Bottom line?


The whole no longer is greater than the sum of its parts.


Bruce Joffe is publisher and creative director of Portugal Living Magazine.

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A Truly “Christian” Man

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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter waves to the congregation after teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia on April 28, 2019. Carter has taught Sunday school at the church on a regular basis since leaving the White House in 1981, drawing hundreds of visitors who arrive hours before the 10:00 am lesson to get a seat and have a photograph taken with the former President and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

I was teaching journalism — specifically, a course entitled News Editing — at George Mason University in January 1981, when I could find no established precedents or protocols, no style guides or textbooks, to cite to my students about the layout dilemma.

On January 20, 1981, two distinctly remarkable, historic, front page news-making moments occurred simultaneously: After 444 days, Americans held hostage by Iran were released; and Ronald Reagan, a former actor and California governor, was inaugurated president of the USA. The hostages were formally released into United States custody just minutes after Reagan was sworn into office as the country’s 40th president on January 20, 1981.

How would or should newspaper editors handle the coverage, my students and I debated: Was one more important, more timely, more consequential than the other? Which story should be featured more prominently? There was no question that both stories demanded front page placement. But where on the page? Traditionally, newspapers place the most important stories at the top of the page; being on the right-hand side implied that a story was more important than others on the page. The Washington Post devoted its front page to these two stories, although one was placed “above the fold,” the other on the bottom half.

Guess which story took priority and preeminence?

Jimmy Carter was bedeviled by two behemoths during his single, four-year presidency.

On November 4, 1979, a group of militarized Iranian college students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Soon, 52 United States diplomats and citizens were held hostage. A diplomatic stand off ensued. Lasting 444 days, this terrorist act triggered the most profound crisis of the Carter presidency, as well as a personal ordeal for the president himself.

President Carter pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting is own political future.

Allegations of conspiracy between Reagan’s presidential team with Iran until after the election to thwart Carter from pulling off an “October surprise” abounded. And thus began the changing of the guard–from partisan distinctions to ugly words and vicious divisions.

The other dragon that President Carter couldn’t slay was economics. Between high inflation and fixed mortgage rates hitting over 14%, it was also about the money … as it always is.

Jimmy Carter has always been a good man. Moreover, he’s been a good Christian man–not just in terms of religious etymology but in practical ways, too. He practiced the words preached by the itinerant Jewish rabbi from Nazareth.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explained what it looks like to live as his follower and to be part of God’s Kingdom. These passages from Matthew perhaps represent the major ideals of the Christian life.

They also reflect peanut farmer Jimmy Carter’s life and legacy.

• Blessed are the weak, for they shall inherit the earth.

• Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the “salt” of the earth.

• Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

• Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

• Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

(About that thirst blessing above, let’s not forget that Jimmy was overshadowed by his younger brother, Billy, and the infamous Billy’s Beer. Indeed, the Georgia farmer brought a colorful cast of characters with him to Washington.)

At 98, Jimmy Carter is one of America’s most active former presidents. His efforts at peace-making, international negotiation, home construction for the impoverished (Habitat for Humanity), and the eradication of diseases in Africa earned him the world’s respect. Forty years after leaving office, he continued to remain an actor on the world stage and at home.

As president, his tireless efforts to bring Israel and Egypt together in a peace agreement during the 1978 negotiations at Camp David may be seen today as the most consequential contribution any U.S. president has made towards Israel’s security since its founding. The treaty earned the Israelis everything they so long had sought: a separate peace treaty that ended not only the state of war with their most threatening neighbor, but also the freedom to carry out other strategic and military objectives without concern for igniting a regional war.

Despite serving a single term, Jimmy Carter ranks as one of the most consequential U.S. presidents when it comes to environmentalism. He installed solar panels on the White House, urged Americans to turn down their thermostats while sporting a sweater, and pressured Congress into putting tens of millions of Alaskan acres off limits to developers.

In 1982, with his wife Rosalynn, he founded the Carter Center dedicated to the protection of human rights, promotion of democracy, and prevention of disease. His determination to promote the rights of women led him, in 1920, to sever ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after six decades, over its rejection of women in leadership positions. He explained his decision to quit the church in a 2009 article entitled “Losing my religion for equality,” which later went viral. “Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God,” he wrote in the article.

The Nobel Peace laureate and longtime human rights advocate campaigned to end violence and discrimination against women since leaving the White House in 1981, calling it the “human and civil rights struggle of the time.”

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Carter said that Southern Baptist leaders reading the Bible out of context led to the adoption of increasingly “rigid” views. Defying the largest Protestant denomination in the United States whose leaders also voted to condemn homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and adultery, he stated, “In my opinion, this is a distortion of the meaning of Scripture … I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God.” Carter continued as a deacon at the Baptist church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he was a faithful Sunday school teacher drawing congregants and visitors alike to rub shoulders with this humble, heart-warming man.

Carter, 98, decided to spend his last days with his family, supported by palliative care rather than medical intervention.

We should nod our heads, hold hands together, and allow our hearts to embrace these words from the scriptures according to Jimmy Carter: “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”