Letters To The Editor

HIGHER EDUCATION

Prejudice not in SFCC curriculum

The degree to which Phyllis S. Heinel (“Why permit lesbian to speak?” Letters, June 3) is distressed that Margarethe Cammermeyer was “allowed to … illustrate her prejudice” at Spokane Falls Community College is equal to the ignorance and prejudice displayed in Heinel’s letter.

It is clear that Heinel didn’t attend Cammermeyer’s presentation. If she had, Heinel would know that Cammermeyer’s purpose was to illustrate the patterns of ignorance, fear and discrimination that recur throughout the history of our nation, especially in the military, since that is where she experienced firsthand the inequities of prejudice.

Heinel suggests that Cammermeyer’s presentation included a “graphic lecture” of her sex life. The only thing graphic about Cammermeyer’s lecture was the brutal reality of the effects prejudice has had on people of color, women and homosexuals in this nation.

In no way was Cammermeyer attempting to “elevate her lesbian status.” She was simply pointing out that all people deserve the same treatment without regard to their sexuality, sex, race, religion, or economic status.

It is unfortunate that Heinel felt it necessary to point out that she “has been a senior student at Spokane Falls” because her quality of thought certainly doesn’t reflect the quality of education provided by this institution. Russell Keevy Spokane

Homophobia no substitute for accuracy

In response to Phyllis S. Heinel’s letter of June 3 (“Why permit lesbian to speak?”):

Heinel is confusing sexual orientation with sexual activity - two separate issues.

Col. Cammermeyer never mentioned sexual activity - hers or anyone else’s - in her presentation. What she did address was discrimination based upon real or perceived sexual orientation and how it relates to discrimination based on other factors.

I applaud Cammermeyer’s courage in sharing her story and thank Spokane Falls Community College for hosting her. Perhaps if Heinel had been at the presentation she would have been able to present an informed critique of it. Kevan Gardner Spokane

What’s in a name change? Meddling

In response to the new college president who wants to rename Spokane Community College and Spokane Falls Community College: Either be quiet or go back to California. He didn’t even know which school his appointment was for.

These schools have long been known and are well known by the names they have now. Tim A. Carson Spokane

PUBLIC SAFETY

Tougher DUI penalties effective

In one year, nearly 24,000 people will lose their lives in alcohol-related car accidents, an average of one alcohol-related fatality every 22 minutes.

Alcohol is legal, popular and widely available, so potential for abuse is high and dangerous. That danger becomes fatal when alcohol is combined with driving an automobile.

Even though there is a law against this, that law is not followed. An estimated 2 million drinkers are arrested each year for driving under the influence. Yet the chances of being arrested for drunk driving are about 1 in 2,000.

I believe that a good prevention of this would be stricter penalties for offenders. In other areas of the United States, harder sentences have worked. In most of these places, accidents caused by drunk drivers have dropped by at least 10 percent in one year.

Drunk drivers injure and kill themselves, their families and others. Unfortunately, the innocent are not immune. Realistically, it doesn’t just happen to “someone else.”

If penalties can’t be strengthened for prevention, at least remember this: There are no good reasons for driving under the influence. Would you rather a friend or family member pick you up drunk at a party or dead at the morgue? Shelley Yada Spokane

Longer yellow lights help in California

In response to Chuck Grizzle’s letter of June 3, I wholeheartedly agree with his idea that a longer yellow light would solve some of our problems with respect to stopping at red lights.

In the California, traffic on the main arterial through Walnut Creek in Concord flows relatively smoothly because they have extremely long yellow signals.

Please, let’s get on a campaign about the yellow light being for stopping and red light being for waiting. Jo Bullock Spokane

PEOPLE IN SOCIETY

Barstad types impervious to remorse

I was very upset with Doug Clark’s statement, “But maybe living is the worst fate that can happen to a menace like James B. Barstad” (column, June 2).

Barstad probably won’t get it. And what about the fate of everyone else? We have been shown too many times that people like Barstad live in denial of their crimes and fail to take responsibility for their actions, always finding a way to put the blame on someone else.

I don’t think it’s going to happen this time, either. Like the guy last summer who plowed into the back of a cement truck, killing two of his passengers after previously having been responsible for killing others the same way.

You can’t keep these guys off the streets and from repeating history again and again. They don’t seem to live in remorse for what they have done. And although they do seem to live miserable lives at others’ expense, it’s the families that must live with the pain and the what ifs for the rest of their lives. My heart goes out to them.

The real justice would have been for Barstad to have been killed and everyone else to have walked away with a few scratches. But life does not always work that way. I pray that it won’t happen to my family someday. Patricia L. Resseman Colbert

Premise just doesn’t apply

I had to read Doug Clark’s column twice to make sure what I had really read (“Living may be the punishment driver deserves,” June 2).

Clark did a wonderful job of pulling our heart strings by giving a good review of the events and the monumental horror of the May 25 accident. What I do not understand is how Clark can believe that what Jim Barstad did that night will haunt him in any way.

Just looking at the way Barstad has conducted his life so far is a pretty good indication to me, and probably a lot of other citizens of Spokane, that nothing really bothers this man.

Barstad will soon be off to prison so us taxpayers can support him for the next few years, provided some public defender doesn’t get him off by claiming that his hair dye triggered his behavioral pattern for the last 10 years. But will he feel remorse, guilt or anything?

Don’t hold your breath.

Sorry, Clark, but you missed the mark on this one. Scott Sanderson Spokane

LAW AND JUSTICE

Affirmative action must go

It is time to repeal affirmative action.

It is extremely outdated and no longer serves its intended purpose. In the 32 years it has been in service it has changed from a simple anti-discrimination measure to a hotly contested issue involving quotas, set-asides and other forms of preferential treatment for minorities, which I feel is wrong.

How is it right that minorities today can get a job just because they have involuntary membership in a group? I see how it was needed back in the 1960s and 1970s, when discrimination was rampant, but things have changed. Now, affirmative action is just a form of reverse discrimination. And discrimination is something affirmative action tried to stop.

It hurts minorities by implying that a double standard must be used for their advancement. Affirmative action just increases racial and gender tension, in workplaces and any other place it is used.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not a racist. But I feel that times have changed enough to play on a level playing field instead of a slanted one. Josh Mills Spokane

Indian sovereignty hostage of courts

Staff Writer Jim Kershner’s “Slot spots on a roll” (May 17) was welcome and informative. However, it did little to dispel the layers of misinformation and ignorance that affects the views of most people regarding Indian nations.

Better informed citizens would have been unmoved by the misinformation propagated by Big Brothers Bingo to defeat Initiative 651 last fall.

This initiative, a proposed tribal-state compact based on the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), could not have spawned “unregulated” gaming, as alleged by some of its opponents.

In fact, native peoples are probably the most regulated in all of human history. The IGRA is a recent chapter in the long history of Congressional attacks on the sovereignty of Indian nations. Congressional and state tentacles continue reaching ever deeper into Indians’ lives.

Casinos are part of the effort to rebuild economies shattered by a deliberate colonial policy of underdevelopment.

Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the sovereignty of Indian nationals confers “a status higher than states.” Nevertheless, the current court majority - Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the Reagan-Bush appointees - refuse to scrutinize the constitutionality of Congressional regulation and state intrusion. Rather, they claimed in Seminole Tribe vs. Florida (1996) that states that refuse “good faith negotiations” with Indian nations are immune from lawsuits in federal courts.

Such refusals, of course, are the primary reason casinos in Eastern Washington lack tribal-state compacts. Whether such casinos are authorized under state law should be deemed irrelevant to the rights of Indian nations to operate them. James Stripes, instructor, American Indian history Washington State University, Pullman

ENVIRONMENT

Forest health bill would bring ruin

I take issue with Opinion Editor John Webster’s startling and disturbing May 22 editorial, “Forest health bill a good prescription.”

Certainly the well-being of logging community families and our regional economy are of paramount concern. But they will be severely harmed if otherwise intelligent politicians and corporations continue to regard our planet’s life-support systems as if they were mere commodities.

Old growth forests must be left intact. Our logging community families, their children and our timber corporations will be much better off working in diversified economies within an intact ecosystem, rather than in a clearcut landscape of tree stumps.

Consider the logging families in Montana, left in the lurch after their forests and their region were ruined.

The forest health bill is a prescription for economic disaster. If our corporate economy is to survive the severe challenges of the next century, we must carefully manage our resources, harvesting timber from tree farms scientifically and wisely, and leaving the old growth intact as a source of newer and hardier tree species.

If all our children are to survive, including those of our logging communities, old growth forests must be left alone to do what they do best for all of us: stabilize climate, provide clean air and water, prevent catastrophic floods and nourish the biodiversity that humanity and our small planet depend on.

For the sake of the timber industry itself, the forest health bill must be replaced by a sustainable approach.

Sustainability and intact old growth ecosystems are the only good prescription for everyone. Bill Osebold Spokane

Environmentalists, you asked for it

Craig Gehrke (“Bad bill for a trumped up crisis,” Letters, May 31) you and your friends have only yourselves to blame for any bills that come out of Washington, D.C.

For years you people have misled the public about your true goals for the nation’s forests. You have used false or purposely skewed science to lock up the forest. You have flooded the courts with nuisance lawsuits and with appeals based on total lies. What did you expect?

Finally we hear what most of us already knew - that those protect-our-forest groups want to stop all logging on public land. Lumber prices are the highest ever and your groups wanted to leave all the burnt timber to rot on the ground.

The Craig bill stopped all those appeals, like the ones filed by Eastern college students to stop a salvage sale in north Spokane County on the grounds that the sale may be in grizzly bear and spotted owl habitat.

When President Clinton and Vice President Gore were elected you thought it would be the best thing you could do to get the biggest environmentalist in the Forest Service appointed to be head of the agency. It backfired; he’s the one enforcing all the laws now and he’s as bad in your eyes as, or worse than, the man he replaced.

If you people were really trying to save the forests you might use less effort trying to stop logging and try instead to reduce wood products use and promote recycling. If demand for wood declines so will logging. Dale Weiler Otis Orchards

OTHER TOPICS

U.N. behind another bad move

An article that appeared in the May 30 Spokesman-Review, datelined Istanbul, Turkey, reported that more than 20,000 government officials, lobbyists, businessmen and scientists will spend less than two weeks (June 3-14) to “come up with a formula … for making cities more livable.” This gives rise to certain observations.

Any time this many bureaucrats and “scientists” get together, the results, if implemented, will be the loss of more freedoms for individuals, families and all legitimate bodies of government.

What the world’s “bursting” urban areas most certainly do not need is more “help” from a United Nations Conference on Human Settlements - whatever that is - to add another layer of oppressive regulations and taxes, making the whole world less “livable.”

We can be assured of one thing, however. This gathering will not address the problem of suitable landfill sites to accommodate all the garbage that will be produced and accessible on computers.

We are obliged to keep saying it until enough people can see the need to get the United States out of the United Nations and get the United Nations out of the United States. Cyril O. McGowan Post Falls

Pro-censorship piece marks new low

Was putting a hack columnist promoting censorship on the same page as the small article reporting on the tribute paid to those who fought and died not only to prevent censorship but to preserve all our freedoms a deliberate slap in the face of your betters, or just thoughtless stupidity?

Any real journalist would be aware that censorship, like other weapons of suppression and control, is a two-edged sword which can and does turn against those who wield it. What then is Doug Clark’s excuse, or is it the obvious?

Those who cry for censorship, whether due to religious or political beliefs, do so for one reason. They are afraid that if challenged in an open forum their dogma won’t prevail in the face of opposing ideas or beliefs.

Although the majority of Clark’s columns are patronizing garbage, even good taste is no reason to promote the evil of censorship.

A Kenneth Stern was quoted as actively promoting censorship to “prevent” domestic terrorism. Has he or his American Jewish Committee taken a stand against domestic terrorist organization in America?

Remember the gang that bragged to the press years ago that it had stockpiled illegal automatic weapons and proudly took credit for bombings in Los Angeles and New York? Or aren’t those actions by the racist JDL considered terrorism? D.E. Twitchell Spokane