Right to Life marchers affirm personhood of the unborn I was happy to see hundreds of thousands of people pack the National Mall on Monday in support of the human rights of the unborn. The Supreme Court short-circuited the democratic system by eliminating the most contentious moral issues — such as marriage and abortion — from the public square and deciding them unilaterally.
In his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that a just law comports with natural law or the law of God. Roe v. Wade is an example of a man-made law that violates the natural law. Everyone, including President Obama, knows that a human embryo is a human being. The roughly 80 percent of the population who use contraceptives know exactly what they don’t want.
The unborn of all races are wrongly treated as property today and denied the right to life because they are not considered persons under the Constitution. We must work to change this mentality.
Gerry Smith
San Francisco, Calif.
Self-interest is not the same thing as greed
Re: “Olbermann leaves, the Right wins,” Jan. 24
The tragedy in Tucson revealed the absolute contempt liberals have for free speech in America — a contempt matched only by their own sense of virtue. Hoping to silence the opposition, the Left hijacked the massacre to whip up hysteria against conservative politicians and talk radio. After all, with political fortunes that depend on picking the pocket of one man to give to another, the Left understands the utility of having everyone embrace their economic philosophy.
But working for the collective is a hard sell in a country with a long tradition of free markets and individual freedom. Self-interest in a market economy is not the same thing as greed, any more than appetite is to be confused with gluttony. But the Left needs people to believe otherwise. Hence, the need to promote a narrative where profit is demonized and opposition to higher taxes is viewed as the very definition of selfishness.
Getting people to defer their own self-interest day after day to the interest of the state requires a hefty measure of coercion and indoctrination. Occasionally it can even involve promoting a blood libel.
Thomas M. Beattie
Mount Vernon
Ten Commandments are universal principles
Re: “Va. school district reposts 10 Commandments,” Jan. 21
I commend the Giles County School Board of Virginia for restoring copies of the Ten Commandments in all county schools.
In coining the phrase “wall of separation of church and state” in 1801, Thomas Jefferson never intended that social and political issues be divorced from codes of morality. He merely meant that the U.S. government be prevented from establishing one or another church as the “official” religion.
The Ten Commandments are not the private domain of any one church. On the contrary, they are universal principles which were already existent in the first democracy of ancient Greece — albeit in a primitive form — according to what the ancients called “unwritten law.” The U.S. government would not, therefore, be endorsing one religion were it to allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed in courthouses, schools and on public property.
Paul Kokoski
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
