LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor:
I am writing to appeal to your readers to speak up and write or call the television stations that are running ads with half naked women, and other ‘soft porn’ tactics. While watching the basketball tournaments on WANE TV this week, a certain radio station has placed an ad with a half-dressed woman prancing around, wiggling into the camera, lifting her shirt (they insert black triangles to cover her private parts), need I go on?
These commercials are run when kids are still awake. So this is what it’s come to? Watching basketball with your family and having to turn the channel or monitor everything your kids are watching to make sure they don’t see the commercials? Give me a break.
It’s bad enough we’ve had to sit through rice meal commercials that will make you ‘feel romantic’ and slide down the front of a refrigerator, shampoos, and conditioners that will make you shout ‘yes’ and Victoria Secret models that parade across the screen with their fronts exposed. Enough is enough.
Our kids have enough temptation in their lives, enough tough choices to make. Do we need to be waving more in front of their faces? In front of adult faces? How many times are we going to project women as objects to get? Hollywood and others believes that sex sells. Unless we stand up and show them that it doesn’t, this is going to continually get worse. Make a difference. Speak up.
Had enough,
Lori
To the readers,
We think of the frontiers of freedom as being patrolled by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. But these days, the Boy Scouts of America and affiliated groups also stand guard. In courtrooms across the country, they’re resisting a domestic strain of tyranny – the totalitarian impulse to police thought and enforce a government-sanctioned orthodoxy on social and cultural issues.
The Scouts are loathed by many self-styled progressives for transmitting a code of commitment, stressing God and country that was supposed to be marginalized by now. But they’re not giving in to bureaucratic bullies who try to force them to shed “outmoded” beliefs on matters of sex and social values. Lovers of liberty – even those who might disagree with Scouting’s principles – should toast their tenacity for the First Amendment and the right not to be politically correct.
The controversy was supposed to have been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court three years ago. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a five-justice majority said that as a private, belief-based organization, the Scouts are free to craft their own membership rules; in particular, government can’t order them to admit homosexuals as leaders. If follows that they’re also within their rights to require that members profess a belief in God.
But an alarming number of local and state officials refused to listen. In 2001, for instance, District of Columbia officials ordered the local Scouts to readmit two gays as adult leaders and pay $100,000 in damages. This decree was overturned by an appeals court, which noted that D.C. should take another look at Dale.
Most of the current government assaults on the Scouts take the form of indirect coercion. There’s shunning, as in San Francisco, where local judges are now barred from participating in Scouting. There’s stigmatizing, as Connecticut and Portland, Oregon, have attempted by excluding the Scouts from the charities that public employees may support through payroll deduction.
There’s also selective denial of public benefits. Berkeley leads the way by singling out the Sea Scouts for a fee to use the city’s marina. After being permitted free use for 50 years, the Sea Scouts in 1998 were suddenly hit with a charge of more than $500 per month. No other nonprofit is required to pay to berth at the marina. The fee is imposed explicitly because of the Sea Scouts’ affiliation with the Boy Scouts.
Today, the Boy Scouts’ and Sea Scouts’ fight is for the survival of a free and robust private sector, a sphere where all may choose their beliefs and affiliations without pre-clearance, editing or censorship by the state, and without fear of official discrimination or reprisal. For defending this basic principle of a free society, the Scouts deserve a hearty salute.
Harold Johnson – (Pacific Legal Foundation Attorney and Counsel for one of Sea Scouts Challenging Berkeley’s Policy)
> Read More Information About Us
> More Articles Written By Our Staff
- Celebrating 20 Years Of Community At The Stand - April 12, 2024
- First Positive Case Of Chronic Wasting Disease In Indiana - April 12, 2024
- Southwest Allen County Schools Embark On Major Tree Plantings - April 12, 2024