Letters to the Editor
Can't divorce marriage, religion Re: "Saying who can say 'I do,' " Wednesday: Your editorial on gay marriage does not give this crucial matter sufficient thought. It never asks why government recognizes a certain relationship above others, or why that relationship has always been one man and one woman.
Can't divorce
marriage, religion
Re: "Saying who can say 'I do,' " Wednesday:
Your editorial on gay marriage does not give this crucial matter sufficient thought. It never asks why government recognizes a certain relationship above others, or why that relationship has always been one man and one woman.
To ask these questions is to arrive at the answer: Society has no greater responsibility than to ensure its future through its children. Children are produced by one man and one woman, and every child longs to know his mommy and daddy.
The great civil rights movements of the past asked about the will of God: Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln in the Second Inaugural, King in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. The gay marriage movement, by contrast, relies on the specious claim that the issue is only legal.
Rev. John Edgar
Elkins Park
Marriage shouldn't
be about religion
There are two ways to make gay civil unions equal in law and practice with heterosexual civil marriages. The first is to upgrade gay civil unions by calling them a marriage. The other is to downgrade civil marriages to some other term that has no religious significance and to use that term for both conventional and unconventional couples.
If the religious are so intent on controlling the term marriage, let them have it. Everyone should get couples licenses; nobody should get marriage licenses. This verbal silliness has gone on for far too long.
Ben Burrows
Elkins Park
Raise gas taxes;
get rid of the tolls
Why have tolls at all? All costs of highways should be incorporated into the gas tax. There is a very high cost of collecting tolls, which would be eliminated and, if properly administered, should be a direct savings to the taxpayer. Since all products we use travel over the highways, we all pay tolls whether we do or do not drive the roads.
Dennis Hassis
Cinnaminson
Tiger is acting
like a child
Tiger Woods was never a child. He was a robot programmed to play golf by a demanding father, much as Joe Jackson did with Michael.
This programming reminds me of the East Germans and the Soviets, who dominated the Olympics by separating youth from their parents and sending them to a sports gulag. Remember that Andre Agassi recently admitted his hatred of tennis but was forced into it by a demanding parent.
When children, such as the child stars now living in misery, are forced to become adults, they become children when they're adults. Why else would a man like Tiger degenerate into a sex addict?
Anthony J. Frascino
Swedesboro
It isn't the teacher;
it's how she teaches
No matter how good the teacher, until our educational system recognizes that kids learn in different ways and at different speeds, we will continue to hemorrhage student failure. Until we are willing to build curriculums around students, instead of expecting them to develop through uniform standards and methods they don't care about or understand, we'll lose as many kids as we graduate. Until we learn what the student knows, we cannot begin to know how he can learn.
The cost of more singular, project-based learning is far less than the price society ends up paying for its failure to ignite a student's interest during the formative years.
Steve Young
Langhorne, Pa
Reform legislation
is unconstitutional
If the health-reform legislation becomes law, it will set the precedent of the federal government's mandating the purchase of something by the citizenry. This assumed power by the federal government has no basis in our Constitution or our other founding documents.
It is just this type of centralized power that our founders feared and worked hard to prevent. If the government can mandate, under penalty of imprisonment, the purchase of health insurance, what else might it require? How about allowing only one child per family?
Dennis McGonigle
Chester Springs
Bike riders aren't
the problem
As someone who walks and rides his bike to and from work every day and pays enough taxes for being a Philadelphia citizen, I am disgusted by all of this exaggerated outrage about bike riders.
One person gets killed by an out-of-control person on a bike, and anti-bikers want to cause more red tape, create more laws, and cost more money for Philadelphians who ride their bikes safely and responsibly.
Bikers' lives are at risk much more than walkers' lives in this city. Bike riders have been killed or seriously injured by cars so many times in this city, yet you don't see them trying to pass a new law to protect us.
I guess we won't feel safe until bicyclists are on the terrorist list.
Clifford Hritz
Philadelphia