Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 30, 1994 TAG: 9409020021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the Aug. 22 editorial condemning Jerry Falwell's rumormongering-for-profit (``Bearing unverified witness''), the only complaint is that you didn't go far enough. What Falwell is doing is just plain wrong. If he has facts, let him present them to the responsible civil authority. If not, he should turn his attention to other things.
But what Falwell is doing isn't merely wrong. It harms the nation, too, for it weakens the president by gratuitously consuming the moral authority that inheres in the office. The presidency represents the nation's sense of self - and America isn't a nation of thieving, murdering philanderers.
This particular president is susceptible to a great many criticisms. As with his hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it may justly be said of Clinton that ``he never told the truth when a lie would do.'' His appointees, e.g., Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, are a national embarrassment. His fiscal policies are a commitment to national bankruptcy, and his statism betrays a deep contempt for those he presumes to lead. He's undeserving of public trust and unfit for public office. It's better, though, to say so openly, and turn him out as an expression of the nation's values, than to destroy him and injure the office he holds by a campaign of subterranean speculations.
Falwell's video does still more harm to the nation: It lends itself to the corruption of what William Bennett has aptly called the ``national conversation,'' because it makes it easy for the president's supporters to characterize the whole of the loyal opposition as Boss Hogg-like buffoons or emaciated, hollow-eyed zealots from the Hookworm Belt.
There's been too much stupidity lately about The Imminent Fundamentalist Jihad, and Falwell only makes it worse. The national conversation requires a common language marked by shared aspirations. He's making of himself, his co-religionists, and countless decent people opposing this president's policies an ugly stereotype - and this guarantees that the conversation will grow more rancorous.
Send money? Hah!
ROBERT M. FELTON ROANOKE
Look closely at North's background
REGARDING THE headline ``Oliver North lied to save lives'' on Elvin Poe's Aug. 16 letter to the editor:
This headline should be put on the car bumper of Oliver North's supporters, because it shows the ridiculous shortsightedness of some people these days. It also would show Virginia voters the need for everyone to vote. If they don't, North may fool enough people to be elected.
Poe's comparing of North to the French Resistance during World War II is completely ludicrous, and an insult to those soldiers. North didn't lie to save anyone's life. He lied to save his own butt. He shredded hundreds of government documents - not to save lives, but his own skin.
North wasn't being questioned by Nazis knocking on the door, but by congressmen elected by the people for the people.
What makes anyone believe if North is elected (and I pray he isn't) that he won't lie to the people of Virginia to protect freedom fighters (big business) he's associated with now?
Virginians need to check his background, not just TV commercials, but past and present newspaper and magazine articles that show him for what he is: a self-centered businessman who hadn't worn a uniform for almost 20 years, with the exception of his attempt to smoke-screen the American people at his Iran-Contra trial. That trial showed that North wasn't aiding the weak, but arming the rich and the Iranians with missiles paid for by American taxpayers.
HANS D. WARNEBOLD MONTVALE
Religion's roots and the abortion issue
SOME WONDER how Southern Baptists and Catholics could agree on abortion when Baptists can't agree on how to run their own convention.
Many Catholics and Baptists are creedalists. Their first allegiance is to the Apostles Creed, from about 50 A.D., and repeated through the Nicene Creed and in subsequent Catholic and non-Catholic confessions through the ages.
Luther, the Protestant founder, objected to specific lapses of scriptural integrity in the Roman Catholic Church. Modern Protestantism - its theology rooted in that of Kierkegaard, the first Protestant existentialist who wrote early in the 19th century - uses its historically sound name as a cover for protesting all historic Western civilization and, with the help of numerous unchurched liberals, to overthrow it.
Kierkegaard types took over much of organized Protestantism earlier in this century. Southern Baptists, through their educational institutions, found themselves on the fringe of this movement. But now the convention majority are trying to restore its doctrinal integrity in keeping with the convention's strongly Calvinist and Augustinian confession. Convention liberals, including most of the Virginia association, are dragging their feet.
I'm in neither of the churches. I'm a journalist who gave up newspapers 25 years ago. Opposing abortion isn't the Apostles Creed. But the creed signifies belief in the total depravity of man and the sovereignty of God in salvation, a sine qua non of the fourth-century Algerian theologian, for whom our oldest city, St. Augustine, Fla., is named. This indirectly affects abortion and all other sins. Socialism, although a milder statism than murderous communism and fascism, isn't Christianity.
NORRIS E. VanCLEAVE ROANOKE
Central America's `Patrick Henry'
A RECENT humanitarian trip into Guatemala's wilderness regions was trip No. 20 in the past nine years.
On July 8 and 9, in a 24-hour period, four soldiers were shot by communist guerrillas in Playa Grande. The lady from Richmond who was with me received a quick lesson on what Guatemala's real problems are. The Cold War is over, except there. The guerrillas won't stop killing and dynamiting as long as there are U.S. citizens helping their revolution.
If Democrats hadn't blocked President Reagan's efforts to do something about the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Central America, thousands of my Indian Christian friends would be alive today. The $9 billion per year the Soviets sent to Cuba, and then the Cubans disbursed throughout the Caribbean, meant no more to the revolutionaries than the continued protection by U.S. Democrats of this bloody revolution.
I support Oliver North. The good people of Central America, who fought for just a little bit of the freedom and rights that all Americans are born with, are so tired of decades of fighting. North never really got anything done for them, but he tried, and they love him for it. He's their Patrick Henry.
A businessman and friend of mine in San Salvador said, ``In the U.S., the liberal Democrats are just an American version of Soviet socialists.'' So true. Any local Democrats who don't like my witness to the truth will be doing me a favor if they never speak to me again. For what's remaining of my life, I intend to make it count! My life and my time will be spent for God, my family and my country. I don't have time for nonsense. I support North.
BETTYE LOTT GORMAN LYNCHBURG
Get facts before challenging Darwin
HUGH W. Maness' letter to the editor (``Believe it or not, it's not science'') contains several errors so gross that I find it hard to believe the Roanoke Times & World-News would print it.
The first mistake regards his statement that the Darwinian theory of evolution explains only the process of a species' extinction. If he had bothered to read even the title of Charles Darwin's ``Origin of the Species,'' Maness would know that the book is about the origins of new species, and not only about the extinction of existing ones.
Another mistake comes in the statement, ``mutation weakens an organism,'' and in the assertion that this proves that Darwin's theory that new species evolve through mutation is false. Maness is only partially correct about mutation. If a species lives in a cold environment, then any individuals who have a mutation that provides them with less fur would have a worse chance of survival. But, if the environment of a species changes (i.e., the climate gets warmer) then any of the individuals that had a certain mutation that provided them with less fur would have a better chance of surviving.
As the Ice Age came to a close and the climate got warmer, the woolly mammoths began to die out because their heavy coats were a disadvantage. Mutant mammoths with less fur (Maness' ``weaker organisms'') survived, and their progeny evolved over many generations to become elephants. This is the basis of Darwin's theory of the evolutionary origin of species.
Next time Maness would like to challenge a scientific theory, he should get his facts straight.
STEVEN P. SOLOW BLACKSBURG
by CNB