Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 1, 1995 TAG: 9508010036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This year's unabashed posturing of the Democrats' leadership can only be attributed to anxiety over the approaching elections (and they should have a great deal of it). Observers of Democrats' maneuvering regarding lottery funds predicted that it was all designed to confuse citizens and provide political cover in the elections. They were right. If Cranwell or any of his partners-in-slime claim that voting for the omnibus Education Act of 1995 was a vote to give schools additional money, don't believe it!
Call it smoke and mirrors, call it a shell game, call it bait and switch - all the cliches apply. Legislation Democrats are claiming provides lottery funds to education does not. If you do the math, their numbers just don't add up. The lottery produces $300 million in revenue annually. Virginia spends $2.1 billion on education annually. Only if the annual lottery fund revenues exceed the annual expenditure for education do schools receive a single additional dollar, and this scenario isn't likely to occur. Democrats just trade general-fund money for lottery money, with a lot of strings attached. It's a raw deal!
Gov. George Allen attempted to support education, public safety and tax relief by directing lottery funds to localities to be used for those purposes at localities' discretion. This additional money would go to local governments incrementally, beginning with $15 million (5 percent) the first year. And by the year 2000, 100 percent of lottery revenues would have been directed to localities as an additional revenue source. That's a good deal!
It's time for Cranwell to pack up his snake oil and go home.
KEN E. BALL JR.
VINTON
High priests of socialism
DOESN'T The Roanoke Times editorial board realize that, in seconding President Clinton's affirmative action plan (July 22 editorial, ``Affirmative on affirmative action''), what's really being said is: ``Affirmative on socialism?'' And that socialism invariably draws its power from the barrel of a gun?
Why is this brand of socialism any different from Gov. Allen running around handing out ``checks'' to various businesses? Something you're quick to hop on.
I'm sorry to say that your newspaper doesn't seem to advocate any position other than what is politically and culturally correct at the time. However, if one insists on affirmative action, please allow me to offer an affirmative action plan of my own:
Let everyone who states that he/she favors affirmative action relinquish his/her job to the next ranking minority group as listed in the country's official census.
Furthermore, require said affirmative-action advocate to ``contribute'' 10 percent of the salary from his/her next job (if one can be found) to go toward financing programs of cultural diversity and racial tolerance.
This plan makes an advocate appreciate the full justice of affirmative action. The best part of all is that it's voluntary.
How about it, comrades? Are you ready for this kind of leadership? If so, step aside and diversify your ranks. The glorious social revolution you preach awaits you.
Or would you rather make somebody else pay? Funny how the high priests of socialism usually like it that way.
JOHN T. JORDAN
BLACKSBURG
Betraying women's reproductive rights
WOMEN ARE the losers in the Republican-controlled House ``victories'' recently.
In voting to eliminate the 25-year-old national family-planning program (which does not use funds for abortions), Republicans are only acting to increase the need for abortions. In this Vatican-like push to prevent access to contraception, those voting against the family-planning program show they are less interested in preventing unwanted pregnancies than in preventing women from controlling their own bodies. Unconscionable, also, is their voting to eliminate access to abortions for poor women - even as a result of rape.
Said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.: "Some of us need lectures on the kinds of anguish individual women go through when they are victims of something as heinous as rape or incest." Those endorsing these anti-reproductive choice measures, sadly, aren't capable of learning from such lectures.
Their next push is a bill aimed at restricting medical schools from teaching abortion procedures to obstetrics/gyn-ecology residents. This way, even if a woman's life is at stake, her chance of getting a safe abortion is decreased. Henry Foster, the recently defeated nominee for surgeon general, testified to having performed many life-saving abortions. Had he only not known how to save those women, according to the morality of this new bill, his opponents would have been more willing to confirm him.
DEBORAH G. MAYO
BLACKSBURG
Bell Atlantic makes false accusations
HUGH Stallard's July 20 commentary (``Big Three are fighting any real competition'') makes claims about AT&T's prices that are false, and deliberately so. He wrongly represented that AT&T hasn't reduced its prices when costs for access were reduced. I'm writing to correct the record, and to suggest it's time for Bell Atlantic's misleading rhetoric to stop.
Stallard's commentary (obviously written by some public-relations person, since it has appeared word for word in other newspapers under the byline of other Bell Atlantic state presidents) involves a simple question of fact: Using inflammatory language, he states that AT&T ``pocketed'' $1.8 billion in access-charge reductions instead of passing them on to customers. This is absolutely false! What's more, the Federal Communications Commission has rejected Bell Atlantic's claim outright. The FCC stated: ``We also conclude that the [long-distance companies] have passed on the savings they have received from lower interstate exchange access fees.''
The fact is that AT&T has passed on savings larger than the cost reductions. For example, the telephone companies, like Bell Atlantic, in 1994, reduced charges we pay them to connect calls by only $718 million. However, AT&T passed along savings of nearly $1.1 billion - some $381 million more than the access reductions.
The commentary also says we've raised rates. That's true. We've increased some basic rates slightly. However, the savings plans and discounts we offer customers more than offset the increases. More to the point, if we raise long-distance rates and customers don't like it, they can decide to take their business to one of the other companies selling long-distance communications in Virginia - and there are scores of them. If customers don't like Bell Atlantic's local calling service, however, they have no choice. At present, the Bell monopoly is the only game in town for local exchange services.
Thankfully, this will begin to change Oct. 1. The State Corporation Commission has set that date for competition to begin when consumers and businesses can choose a communications company other than Bell for local toll calls. Ultimately, Bell Atlantic will learn to compete by reducing prices and improving services. Competing by maligning potential competitors in print, as Stallard has done, does nothing good for customers.
PAUL RADIKE
Account executive for AT&T
ROANOKE
This is not contraception
STAFF writer Sheba Wheeler's July 23 Horizon section article on ``emergency contraception'' (``The morning after'') mischaracterized the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion and contraception. Since the Catholic Pro-Life Foundation of the Blue Ridge is committed to proclaiming the church's teachings on the dignity of human life, we must respond.
As set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all artificial methods of contraception are ``intrinsically evil'' because they are opposed to the virtue of chastity in marriage. While the use of natural methods of fertility regulation is moral, provided that it isn't motivated by selfishness, even ``legitimate intentions on the part of spouses do not justify the recourse to morally unacceptable means.''
The Catechism states that ``human life must be respected and protected from the moment of conception.'' Thus, any birth-control method that doesn't prevent conception but instead kills the developing embryo, even before implantation with the mother's uterus, is condemned by the church as abortion.
The so-called ``emergency contraception'' methods discussed in the article do not prevent fertilization (i.e. conception), but instead prevent the implantation of the newly created embryo in his/her mother's uterine lining. These methods don't prevent pregnancy. Rather, they terminate the life of the developing human being.
To call these methods ``contraception'' is fallacious and misleading to women who have the right to know what they really are: abortifacients.
PATRICIA HENRY
Spokeswoman, Catholic Pro-Life
Foundation of the Blue Ridge
SALEM
by CNB