Correspondence

We would like to reply to a letter in last week’s paper.

When a drug dealer sells drugs to anyone, they should be locked up. When they sell drugs to 13-year-old kids and maybe younger, they for darn sure should be locked up. If you believe getting kids hooked on drugs is not a ‘real crime,’ you need some serious help. We are a nation, supposedly of laws, even when our government only enforces the ones that get them votes. But we the people can clean them out. If they know they are going to lose their gravy train, they just might change.

As far as the Boogeyman, you say, they put on uniforms and pretend to be combating serious crime. They get jobs, helicopters, cars, guns, etc., and dress up like ninjas and kick in people’s doors, etc. Without them we would be just like Mexico. The drug cartels would be over here and take control in an instant. As for us, we sleep better knowing we have law enforcement, courts, etc.

From your point of view and opinion of our law officers, courts, etc., you might be a lot happier living in Ojinaga, Mexico, with the drug lords, killings, beheadings and not much law enforcement. It seems they do things just the way you like them done. It’s everything you described in your letter that you wanted. If you’re a high school teacher or college teacher, seeing how you referred to a former student, God help our kids! OJ is about 80 or 90 miles away and just your kind of place. So, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Mexican prisons might be a lot better and not as crowded.

You say we have been fighting the drug war for 40 years. Well, we have been fighting the closing of the border with Mexico longer than that. Guess you think we should just give up fighting all crimes and let anarchy prevail. That’s what your letter sounded like to us.

Janice and John Jones

Fort Davis

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Regarding church-owned businesses being required to provide contraception in their health plans:

While claiming that the Obama Administration is conducting a war on religion, the Catholic Church and conservatives are actually conducting a war on women of child-bearing age.  Freedom of religion under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution does not rest with the churches as institutions or as employers.  It is an inalienable right of people, that is, human beings, in this case, women.  Thus, requiring all health plans to provide contraceptives does not violate the rights of the church in the slightest.

Individual women have rights to both privacy in their health care decisions and in religious practice.  Individual women have the right under our labor laws to equal treatment by their employers.  Thus the choice to obtain contraceptives rests entirely with them and their doctors and insurance plans must provide women of child-bearing age with the same coverage it provides to other prescription users.  Employers are not even allowed to know what elements of their health plan employees are using.

Furthermore, failure to cover contraceptives is not just a violation of the rights of the individuals. It places the health of women at greater risk and harms them economically.  Pregnancy is a serious health risk for a woman, greater than the risk of taking contraceptives.  This means that contraceptives are preventive health care and preventive care should be provided at no cost.  Last time I checked, contraceptives without insurance were over $40 a month, thus putting them out of the reach of low-income women.  And over 90% of women will use contraceptives during their childbearing years.  Some older women may even take contraceptives to ease the transition to menopause.

The Federal government has responsibility to protect the rights of individuals and employees.  And it has authority to set standards and requirements for health insurance plans for our protection. The church is free to stop running their own health insurance program if they can’t run it according to the governmental standards.  In fact, they get billions from the government for their health care businesses.

In a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, http://publicreligion.org:

* 73 percent of Democrats agree that employers should be required to offer health plans that cover contraception at no cost.

* 65 percent of millenials (Americans age 18-29) agree that employers should be required to offer health plans that cover contraception at no cost.

* 62 percent of women agree that employers should be required to offer health plans that cover contraception at no cost.

* 58 percent of Catholics agree that employers should be required to offer health plans that cover contraception at no cost.

* 57 percent of all voters agree “that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women.”

* 55 percent of ALL Americans agree that employers should be required to offer health plans that cover contraception at no cost.

* 53 percent of Catholic voters agree “that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women.”

And consider this: 28 states have passed the same requirement for employers to provide contraception in health care plans as is proposed by the US Health and Human Services Department.  Most have no exemption for religious employers.

The Catholic Church’s demands are just another instance of seeking to impose their will on all women, not just of their particular faith, but of any faith or none at all.  We are not a theocracy, but the Church here is stepping out with direct political action to get their religious edicts inserted into our laws and regulations, and they have roped conservatives into supporting their cause.  That is something churches, with their tax-exempt status, are not supposed to do.

Mary Bell Lockhart

Alpine

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In the recent weeks there have been letter after letter to you from folks in Alpine and Ft. Davis regarding our current President and little to say about what the options might be for the future.

First of all I would like to say something about the current GOP candidates. With the four currently remaining this is what you have to select from: 1. A flip flopper, 2. someone that wants to bomb Iran, 3. a radical and 4. someone that wants to shut down everything.  Which one would you chose? I suppose your rant would be to choose anyone but President Obama. That could be a serious mistake.

You rant about the Keystone Pipeline. If they have 20,000 jobs for this so called “shovel ready” project then they could, would need to dig it by hand. This number is inflated by at least 17,000 people by the GOP. The contractor would go broke with this kind of payroll. Secondly, have you ever been to the Atabasca Tar Sands in Ft. McMurry, Alberta? That’s Canada if you don’t know. Well I have. We don’t need that crude passing all the way through our country. Massive aquifers, farmland, sandhills, etc.  Currently we are exporting fuel due to less fuel being used because of our more economical vehicles. Fuel is high because of the oil companies, not because of the lack of crude oil.

So give some thought about your vitriol and rants. Also you might try sending them to your own papers instead of to Marfa. Maybe folks in Ft. Davis and Alpine care more about your concerns than we do here.

Kerr Mitchell

Marfa

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Ron Paul’s America. What Ron Paul brings to America is the same set of radical ideas that America’s founders brought to it over 200 years ago. Jefferson and Madison were influenced by John Locke whose ideas ended the tyranny of powerful central government—monarchy–in America and eventually Europe. Locke saw that the justification of government is to protect the liberty and property of its citizens. Beyond that, government, as the wielder of police power, is dangerous.

Why does this idea seem so radical today? It is because an intellectual sea change took place in 19th century Europe. Locke’s idea that the individual has the capacity to govern himself by reason was replaced by the idea that the individual is weak and irrational with his only salvation being to merge himself into the collective. As a result, long story short, we had the Marxist revolutions of the early and mid-20th century, the fascist regimes causing World War II and the creeping socialism that characterizes Europe and America today.

Ron Paul’s America returns us to the notion of a government limited to protecting liberty. Yes, in it, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs are gradually replaced by private solutions. But promises to current recipients, and those nearing qualification, must be honored, thus no one is thrown into the street.

In Ron Paul’s America there is much regulation of commerce but it is mediated by voluntary participation. There is nothing the public sector does today that cannot be accomplished by private citizens without forced funding through taxation.

In this America, all human relations, whether personal or commercial, occur by mutual consent. The government’s role is to say 1) you cannot initiate the use of force to accomplish your ends, and 2) you cannot use fraud. The role of the legislature and judiciary is to apply these two rules. The proper and limited role of the government’s police power is to enforce them.

This is the ideal that Ron Paul offers to America. Today this ideal is spreading due to an intellectual sea change taking place once again, one that is deepening and extending the radical notions of John Locke and America’s founders.

Molly Sechrest

Alpine

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A plurality of Americans believe young adults are having the toughest time of any age group in today’s economy, and even more of the public says young people are finding it harder to pay for college, find a job, buy a home or save for the future than it was for their parents’ generation. In spite of the hardships young adults currently face, their long-term economic optimism remains notably unscathed. Read more: http://pewrsr.ch/xjyb5x

It seems clear Rick Santorum has the crowd’s heart. His momentum is real. His positive appeal is real. But there are lingering doubts about his general election viability. Most people still recognize Mitt Romney as the guy whose race it is to win or lose. He has failed to connect with the crowds and he desperately  needs a home run . The people like Newt Gingrich because they think he is a bold thinker, but they don’t trust him because of his lack of self-discipline. There are doubts if he is even viable any more. It still remains, who the Republican nominee will be is still up in the air.

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population within its borders and 25% of world’s prison population, most in prison for petty crimes that has cause no real harm except to the prisoners themselves, just as using drugs. We do not imprison our alcoholics or smokers that cause more harm then any drug addict. We imprison more and more people because the prisons’  lobbyist organization demand longer and longer prison terms. As tax payers, I think it is time we demand reform in our justice system, such as repealing ‘three strikes and you’re out law”,  shutting down privately owned prisons, shortening the length of prison terms, using more community services for payment to society for minor crimes committed mostly by youngsters too young to realize what prison is all about. There are many other ways to depopulate our prisons, just research it. Mitt Romney and Newt continue to report a extremely high unemployment rate. To learn the real truth check out ‘What’s the real jobless rate’ at www.checkfact.org.

Joyce Wright

Alpine

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Re: the fruits of uber-patriotism

Is another debacle on the horizon given all the talk and hype about an attack on Iran? What’s the problem with slowing things down? Failing to heed Davy Crockett’s time-tested advice, “make sure you’re right, then go ahead” leaves us trusting the same establishment whose foreign policy “expertise” brought us Iraq II and Vietnam.  There’s not much political capital left in that account, is there?

Remember “Freedom Fries” and radio stations boycotting recording artists daring to suggest reconsidering invading Iraq in 2003? Sadly, that won’t deter uber-patriots immune from contemplating anything to do with reality once the right wing media set their hooks into them about Iran.

Meanwhile, in order to stay ahead of the predictable appeals to patriotism, let’s get the “love it or leave it – my country right or wrong” uber-patriotism crowd something to rally around.  Keeping uber-patriots satiated means no more lamb, hummus and pita bread in the Congressional cafeteria or on our plates.  Support the troops and ban it and Rumi poems before any country attacks Iran.

Worry not.  The lamb-pita-hummus ban won’t last forever.  These warmongers are a fickle bunch; not in it for the long haul, uber-patriotic utterances notwithstanding.  Modern wars outlast attention spans limited to boiling instant rice or a Fox news cycle.

For all those uber-patriots previously disgusted with French Fries and turning the radio off rather than hearing the Dixie Chicks, the bill is over-due.  Sorry uber-patriots, you don’t get off easy by supporting Ron Paul now. You wanted the Iraq war, so pay-up for the costs, including budget deficits, a crumbling infrastructure and casualties – ours and theirs!

In your accounting ledger, cutting taxes is the best way to finance a war.  Regardless, your taxes aren’t lowered vs. those of us asking for caution, common sense and not putting the hook into our collective mouth in yet another generation, until the debt is paid for a misadventure less than a decade old.

the Rev. Barry Abraham Zavah

Alpine