LETTERS

— Freedom of speech alive

Michael Fowler’s recent letter is rife with misunderstanding. The fact that American citizens have the right to their opinions is so obvious as to make writing in the contrary nonsensical.

Neither Fowler nor Rush Limbaugh were required to seek government approval for their comments, nor, having now made them, will they be sanctioned or punished by the government.

Freedom of speech isn’t dying in our country, as Fowler suggests. However, well-funded free speech may be; the jury is still out. Surely freedom of speech is accompanied by freedom to spend advertising dollars as a company sees fit. The shame, clearly, is on companies who fund opinions with which they cannot align.

In speaking about his children’s future collegiate placement Fowler wrote, “I want them to go to a prestigious college, not a promiscuous one.” In point of fact, it is people who have sex, not institutions, and he’ll be hard pressed to find a college to which he can send his children where the people are not already sexually active.

His final sentence, “Learning should be the only objective in college, not protection from pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases,” denies reality. It is precisely because students are sexually active now as young as middle-school age that there has never been a time when learning about avoiding both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases was more valuable or in greater demand.

MIKE RUSH

Conway

A waste of resources

I am amazed that any national, state or local office would be required to provide voter-registration forms or ballots in any language other than English.

To be eligible to vote, a person is supposed to be a U.S. citizen. To become a U.S. citizen, one of the requirements is that you must be able to read, write and speak basic English.

Maria Hicks, of the 3rd District Hispanic Caucus and a candidate for justice of the peace in Washington County, has asked if someone would fill out the form if the language it was written in wasn’t the first language that person knew. My answer is that I would be sure I was proficient in the language it was written in before I would expect to be allowed to vote.

If a person does not understand how to fill out the form (which contains personal information that one should know well), how can one possibly understand the pros and cons of an issue to make a knowledgeable decision on how to vote?

Wasted resources such as the cost to print these items in languages other than English have contributed to our country being $15 trillion in debt.

JUDY LEWIS

Fayetteville

Might we suggest . . .

The recent suggestion that we reread Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin could well be followed by chronologically written autobiography Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, and then Native Son by Richard Wright, and finally, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Stowe and Lee are white and Washington and Wright are black.

All of the books describe the plight of black men of the past and, somewhat, of the present, but none seem more accurate in telling how an individual may feel than Wright’s book, written in the 1930s.

I would even guess that Harper Lee read all three of those previous books before she wrote hers.

EDDIE FLEEMAN

Forrest City

Ignoring their beliefs

Letter writer Lally Brown, commenting on a Michael Ramirez political cartoon, apparently looks only at the pictures and not the additional captions listed. Gerald Ford said ina joint session of Congress in August of 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you need is a government big enough to take away everything you have.”

The contraception question was introduced by George Stephanopoulos in a debate question to Republican hopeful Mitt Romney in January. Why? I believe it was because our president was about to drop a political bombshell on religious health-care providers. Barack Obama said that all employers, regardless of religious beliefs, must provide insurance access to contraception. When this created an uproar from Catholic hospitals, Obama issued his, in my opinion, accounting-trick answer, saying he would mandate that the insurance provider pay for these items. Who pays the bill when the hospital is self insured? Who pays the bill when it’s the hospital’s employees?

Brown apparently has no Catholic friends or chooses to ignore their religious beliefs. After all, liberals are never responsible for their guilty feelings since they do not seem to believe in individual responsibility anyway.

I enjoyed Ramirez’s political cartoons for seven years in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Perhaps Brown should become acquainted with his work before commenting further.

GARY McDONALD

Tumbling Shoals

Not really a moderate

Funny thing about voting records, you can run but you can’t hide from them.

Sen. Mark Pryor voted to not rescind the edict of President Barack Obama, that employers, including religious ones, must offer their employees birth control regardless of their core beliefs. Further, insurance companies must include contraceptive benefits.

Pryor would like us to believe he is a moderate. He creates some “pork” for us occasionally. But when it comes time to vote, he tends to falls in lockstep behind Harry Reid and Obama. Make no mistake, he is a hard-core, follow-the-party-at-all-costs liberal. Remember, his vote helped make the Obamacare monstrosity a law.

Don’t forget this the next time he runs for office. Do not be deceived.

MICKEY JORDAN

Hot Springs Village

Accomplished much

This is a first for me in expressing what’s on my mind for the Voices section. I read the paper daily and I always end up on the letters page where readers can express themselves.

In my reading, there is always one Arkansas resident knocking my president, President Barack Obama, or trying to poison the public’s opinion about him. Well, this is one Arkansas resident, an African American, who is standing up for President Obama. This man has done nothing but try to help all American citizens-repeat, all American citizens, no matter his or her color or creed. His accomplishments far outreach those of his predecessor. I will not call his name. Some letter writers would have you believe that his being in office is the worst thing for the nation and the economy. Due to word limitations, I cannot really address his positive accomplishments.

Is he the greatest president? There has never been a truly great president, for they are all humans with some degree of faults. But President Obama is not the worst president, no matter what your political persuasion. Be it known, you critics of him are probably the recipients of some of his accomplishments put into law since he has been the president.

I’ve always heard this old saying, that if you can’t say something good about someone, chill and don’t say anything at all-especially about my president. Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief and the president of the United States of America. God Bless America.

LESTER PIGGEE

Jacksonville

That double standard

Hillary Clinton basically called Gen. David Petraeus a liar as he testified before Congress about the surge plan for the Iraq war. MoveOn.org called him General Betray Us. George Bush was regularly called a Nazi. Bill Maher’s foul-mouthed names for Sarah Palin and Jimmy Fallon’s band playing a vulgar rap song when Michelle Bachmann walked on stage for his show were beyond disgust. During the 2010 election, Democrats ran a TV ad showing Republicans pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair off a cliff. None of this liberal hate behavior ever incites anyone to violence. Only a conservative talk-show host’s rhetoric can do that, or so we are led to believe by some Voices letter writers and columnist John Brummett.

Rush Limbaugh is, in my opinion, a brilliant commentator and he is always three steps ahead of the liberals who hate him so. But he surely used poor judgment in his comments about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke and he could easily have made his point without them. I’m sure Rush couldn’t care less about Fluke’s or any woman’s birth-control practices. He was pointing out the absurdity of someone attending a school that costs over $50,000 per year suggesting she couldn’t afford $10 to $15 a month for birth-control pills.

I read that Barack Obama called Fluke to apologize for Limbaugh’s comments. Still waiting to hear of Obama’s call to Palin for his $1 million donor Maher’s smutty comments about her.

JIM LAUX

Sherwood

Craving some civility

What is wrong with Americans? Why can’t we have civil discourse like we used to?

It occurs to me that people living in small-town America do not get their news from CNN, ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC or MSNBC. They watch Fox News if they watch news at all. They read newspapers like this one. Chances are that they are poor and get most of their news from radio. They are not stupid; they just can’t afford cable TV. Glenn Beck educates them in history, religion and the Constitution. This is followed by the nation’s number one clown, Rush Limbaugh.

Educated people say they listen to him just to be entertained, but he is basically the leader of the Republican Party. Then they listen to James Dobson, the Family Research Council and certain despicable Christian preachers who preach hatred for liberal Democrats from the pulpit. It is all about abortion-it’s murder; you vote Democratic, you will burn in hell forever! Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity round out their education. It makes me sick to think that the poor people in America have been brainwashed by the likes of these. That is the reason you can’t talk to those Americans who are hard-core Republicans.

They are brainwashed. Fox News is the most watched cable news channel. What this tells me is that those of us who watch other channels still get our news from a legitimate news source. PBS has, by far, the best news program in the evening. One full hour of unbiased news and commentary, fair and balanced.

RUUD DuVALL

Fayetteville

Feedback Others important

While my heart goes out to the family of Trayvon Martin for the terrible killing of their son, I confess that I’m confused.

Where are all the protesters when innocent people, including babies in their beds, are murdered in drive-by shootings?

Where is Rev. Al Sharpton when thousands of children are abused and even killed by their own parents?

I mean no disrespect to the Martin family, but the killings of these people are just as important.

STEVE WELCH

Mountain Home

Smart, informative

Please don’t ever get rid of Michael Ramirez’s informative, sharp, smart and important editorial cartoons.

His comments and caricatures are so right-on, it is exceptional-especially his recent depiction of David Axelrod defending Bill Maher’s comments. And then, to have Charles Krauthammer’s column below that made the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette a must read for the day.

MARILYN H. WOODS

Lakeview

Editorial, Pages 15 on 03/30/2012

Upcoming Events