Hung up on restrooms
I don’t really understand the bathroom controversy. All of a sudden this is the latest subject du jour. Unless you are going to spend an inordinate amount of time in a restroom, it seems to me this is slightly overplayed.
As far as children are concerned, I would be more worried that a person of the same sex as the child might render more of a threat. There is usually a “family” room available, which is totally private, if one is too worried.
In Europe, people urinate against walls along the streets, and most restrooms are unisex.
I think we are making a mountain out of a molehill. Just sayin’.
BILL RATCLIFF
Little Rock
Run it like business?
A lot of people think we should run government like a business. It seems so simple. Businesses sell things, pay their expenses, hopefully make a profit. Government takes in taxes, provides services (national defense, police, roads maybe), hopefully breaks even. But government is not like a business.
Recently, Donald Trump said that as a businessman, housing bubbles are good. In 2008, if you shorted the housing market, you were a genius and made a fortune. But if you are the president in 2008, and millions of your citizens are underwater on their loans and quit making mortgage payments, and banks and mortgage companies have no income and quit loaning money to other businesses, you have a panic and the making of a great depression. Unless the government takes measures. Drastic measures. Seven-hundred-billion-dollar measures, to save American banks and, by extension, the world economy.
So governing is different than being a yugely successful businessman.
Full disclosure: I’ve never set foot in an economics classroom. Nor government. Yet I hope I’ve explained it clearly enough. Trump doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Sadly, neither do his supporters.
KEITH PAYNE
Bentonville
Taking responsibility
Barack Obama apparently believes the bombing of Hiroshima was evil. Mr. President, what was evil was Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, sinking of the USS Cole and 9/11.
I am thankful we had Harry Truman as president, who said the buck stops with him. His decision to use the bomb saved countless lives. We need leaders like him today to take responsibility for their actions and not blame someone else when things go bad.
BILL SCHEIDERER
Forrest City
Shouldn’t print that
I don’t know why I continue to subscribe to this newspaper. Do you really need to print a letter that jokes, or maybe someone is really serious, that suggests everyone in the LGBT community should wear diapers so they don’t have to use a public restroom? How about commentary from readers with a brain?
DEANNA PUCKETT
Roland
The true sin of Sodom
Before the proliferation of translations with agendas and the substitution of innuendo and slander for honest scholarship, the Hebrew prophets knew what the true crime of Sodom was. Jesus did, too (whether he should be numbered among the prophets is a question we will leave open). These men did not mince words.
If any sort of sexual depravity had been the Sodomite sin, they would have said so, in no uncertain terms. When Isaiah and Jeremiah (in his Lament), Hosea and Jesus invoke the doom of Sodom, what they decry is the utter disregard for the ancient laws of hospitality, as the Sodomites displayed, and rich living at the expense of one’s own dependent folkthe widows, the orphans, the holy men, the stranger within your gate.
Space does not allow a demonstration of all the flaws in the popular understanding of the Sodom story in Genesis. Anyone with resort to the original language (even a good concordance will work) and a few reliable histories can discover how early church fathers and late Roman rabbis conflated the Genesis story with that of the rape at Gibeah in Judges 19 and began insinuating sexual elements that simply weren’t there originally at Sodom.
Ever since then, it seems irresponsible churchmen have been happy to leave the question of Sodom’s sin to go begging, blithely reading “sodomite” completely inappropriately in such places as the Levitical Code of Purity and the letters of St. Paul.
The real Sodomite treats strangers abominably and indulges in sumptuous living at the expense of the needy. Welcome to New Sodom.
STANLEY G. JOHNSON
Little Rock
Just review the films
Why is it that every time I read a movie review by Piers Marchant, I feel as if I need a degree in college composition? I understand the need (or perhaps ego) to appear as an intellectual writer. But come on! All I am looking for is an honest review of the story and the ability to make a decision if I want to see it. His column may be his need to finish some great novel that never came to be.
I’m sure Mr. Marchant does a good job for the newspaper regularly, but I am an intelligent person who just wants to know the story and actors’ interpretation. Thank you.
ELAINE BURKS
Little Rock