Dear Editor:
I think my liberal Democrat card is about to be revoked. I’ve watched with concern the rescue and recovery effort in Louisiana. And I’ve been in awe of the volunteers who’ve shown up to make a horrible situation even slightly better. I give you The Cajun Navy as an example.
Video after video and still shot after still shot shows them carrying young folks, old folks, disabled folks and pets to their boats and ferrying them off to safer places. All this with zero expectation of remuneration. All this because someone needs help, they’ve got the gear to help and it’s the right thing to do. Most, if not all, of the folks needing help were black and most, if not all, of the Cajun Navy were white.-
Now I guaran-damn-tee you most, if not all, of the Navy have a MAGA hat at home. And when they told their MAGA hat-wearing boss where they were going, they said, “See you when you get back. You need any gas money?†The point to all this is. These MAGA hat-wearing, Trump-loving, mouth-breathing crackers have put Black Lives Matter into action. Action well beyond carrying a sign in a demonstration (as long it’s a pretty day and there is a Starbucks en route).
Imagine that. A MAGA hatter wading through snake and alligator infested water to help an old Black couple get to a shelter where they can get the help they desperately need!
So I proffer the following.
Stop with this relentless stigmatization that sophomorically jumps to “If you’re X that automatically means you’re Y.†I know I’m plenty guilty of that, and I resolve to stop it. It’s time to tell the “leaders†of both persuasions to STFU. It’s time to turn off the judgement switch. It’s time to embrace our common humanity.
In short, we are not our parts. We are the sum of our parts. That sum equals millions upon millions who joyfully give of themselves when called on. Yes, there is a minority of scum-bags (Kevin McCarthy, Orange Don, Jim Jordan, Al Sharpton… the list goes on) who profit from the “parts,†but don’t be discouraged. The Cajun Navy stands ready to sail again.
Ray Radford,
Anchorage, Kentucky
Dear Editor:
I have been pro-choice since I first knew about abortion, and when I lived in Detroit from 1951-53, my husband and I spent much time with a physician who very often told us about his women patients who had tried unsuccessfully to abort themselves. Those gruesome stories made me even more convinced that I was pro-choice. And so, I was very happy when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Yet, I know something was wrong about that decision —it was based on privacy and I knew that privacy’s not in the U.S. Constitution.
Griswold v. Connecticut, an earlier Supreme Court ruling that struck down state bans on contraception, was also based on privacy. In that case, Justice Douglas said in his majority opinion, “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights.†However, the right of privacy is not in the Bill of Rights either. Nor is it even in The Declaration of Independence (which I realize is not law).
That the privacy right established in the Griswold decision seemed a terribly weak foundation is what Sarah Weddington (the attorney for so-called “Jane Roe,†a Texas woman who had sought an abortion and who was asking the court to legalize it in Roe v. Wade) said when asked where in the Constitution she placed her argument. However, she accepted the Supreme Court’s January 22, 1973 decision to uphold Roe v. Wade based on the basis that “the right of privacy… is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy†—even though the right of privacy was, and still is, not in the U.S. Constitution.
The marvelous writer Jill Lepore tells us in her great book, These Truths, that the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and other groups made arguments for abortion rights based on equality that the Supreme Court ignored in Roe v.Wade, and that Ruth Ginsburg “found the court’s opinion in Roe wanting for a number of reasons, but among them was its failure to pay any attention at all to discrimination against women, or to a woman’s “ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen.’â€
Being equal is at least in the Declaration of Independence and equity is in the U.S. Constitution. And equity probably should therefore be the basis on which the Supreme Court decides in favor of abortion.
But what bothers and disgusts me most of all is that the Supreme Court says that unborn fetuses with a heart beat cannot be aborted, while it remains silent about guns being available to kill so many children.
Reverend Judy Deutsch