University Daily Kansan, March 11, 1981
Opinion
Fire alarms essential
Over a year ago, the University was warned by fire officials.
Last Saturday, it was warned again.
Those warnings were the flashing red lights of fire trucks parked along Jayhawk Boulevard.
When will Bailey Hall get a fire alarm system?
Saturday's minor fire on the first floor of the building once again proved the necessity of a fire alarm system in every building on campus. The 30 or so people occupying Bailey at the time had to be individually told to evacuate.
Fire inspectors in February 1980 urged the University to install such a system. Last fall, state fire officials came to KU to investigate potential firetrapts inside Bailey. In spite of all the warnings, nothing's been done.
Back when Bailey was built at the turn of the century, fires were the most feared of all disasters. Eighty-one years after Bailey's construction, that fear of fire seems to have disappeared, as if disastrous fires couldn't happen at a modern university.
But are fires any less deadly today than they were in 1900?
The installation of Bailey's fire alarm system is awaiting the allocation of funds for remodeling. Those funds are but shadows in the tenuous future, yet lives are at stake in Bailey today.
Bailey needs fire alarms, and it needs them now. The University's had enough warning. Without an alarm system, the next time trucks are sent to Bailey, the University might find itself issuing obituaries instead of excuses.
Letters to the Editor
Protest of homosexual dance sparks praise, condemnation
To the editor:
After being painted in a recent editorial as "hypocritical" and "dangerous," I thought it appropriate to explain my actions in protesting the homosexual valentine dance at the Kansas Union. Not that I particularly care what an excited undergraduate editorialists thinks of me personally, but I'm writing so people can understand our true motives for doing what we did.
There were so many inconsistencies and errors in that editorial, it's difficult to know where to start. For instance, the writer's definition of sodomy has nothing to do with the Kansas legal definition, which specifically includes all types of homosexual intercourse, and includes nothing between married, consenting adults. It's strictly a matter of gender.
Also, the writer said the sodomy statute wasn't enforceable. Apparently she doesn't know about the state prison at Lansing, because a number of convicts are there for this very violation.
Another error the writer made in her thinking was accepting the homosexual argument that we're only unhappy because society condemns us. We shouldn't be unwritten censure of homosexuality, those in it would still be unhappy. It isn't simply a matter of external pressure, but inward pressures from one's own conscience. Those I've talked with have been one of the gay movement make this point very clearly.
One of the most glaring inconsistencies in the editorial was how greatly the writer and the cartoonist condemned those whose actions they did not have at the same time said that condemination is bad.
I don't want anyone to think that we have some sort of phobia or even dislike toward homosexuals. The only reason we did what we did was to help awaken those at the dance to the folly of their actions. Many homosexuals would be moved in a minute if they knew they could not be prosecuting it. All we did was to try to point people on the only place they can get real help — Christ.
So it's quite possible that people who know about and yet have still rejected Christ from being their savior and lord are setting themselves up for a far worse destiny than the Sodomites. By this standard, an editorialist or cartoonist, for instance, can actually be worse off than a homosexual who doesn't know much about Christ.
Doug Lamborn
Lawrence residen
Sodomy defined
"Let him who has no sin cast the first stone." This Bible verse is the great edifice many raise in the name of tolerance, tolerance to deprived and reprobate practices. And like a building one hears Jesus' conclusion to the passage "Go and sin no more." (John 8:11)
Jane Neufeld's article, "Anti-gay protesters are hypocritical," said the protesters' banner, "Does KU sanction sodomy?" was unfounded. Webster defines sodomy as "any sexual intercourse considered abnormal, as between two male persons." The dance of Feb. 21 had prompted Webster for the participants; in other words, homosexuals set up for the occasion. It follows that if you sanction the birds to build their nest, you're sanctioning them to lie together, too.
To the editor:
Jesus Christ himself hated such practices as he did all ill. And he himself died to liberate us from sin. To ignore what Jesus said about sin is not to be liberated, but enslaved. The worst type of slavery is for one to be enslaved to himself and to his passions.
As I look at myself and the world around me, I realize that what I and my world needs to hear is
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affirmed by the editors, the letter should include the writer's home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
Chuck Vanasse Overland Park senior
seldum what is wanted to be heard. The truth hurts. Some might exclaim, "You're narrow-minded!" Well it's not original with me; Jesus himself said, "Enter by the narrow gate for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. There are others, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it." (Matthew 7:13-14).
Leave them in peace
To the editor:
In recent days we have seen an abundance of anti-homosexual sentiment forming around the country. Although this is to be expected in this country, it does not this does not mean that it should go unchallenged.
The Topeka Capital-Journal recently ran a story about certain fundamentalist groups spending $3 million on a media attack designed to build such sentiment. Supposedly public pressure could be used to their advantage to harass a group of people who had not made the move, and they used their belts. Dean Wycoff, a member of the group, the Moral Majority, compared homosexuality to murder and sanctioned capital punishment as a possible way of fighting homosexuality.
As a Christian, I am appalled at the lack of Christian qualities these groups have. Where did the right to a free agency go? What happened to mercy, understanding and love, which are so intrinsic to our belief in God? Are not the qualities Christians should try to emulate already waging some cruel vendetta upon some already suppressed segment of society?
Granted, as responsible people and parents, we have the right to protect society from harm or unhealthy situations. However, some rational basis for the anticipated danger should prevail. Because we have no proof that homosexuals are innately child molesters, recruiters or any number of other frightening things, where does the danger lie, except in the fact that one might have been abused by someone found in the homosexual community are problems of rejection, repression and persecution, having little to do with homosexuality itself. Are these groups assuming it is Christian to add salt to these wounds? For the sake of humanity, aren't people allowed to live in peace?
Chris Budd Lawrence senior
I would like to address the protesters who were outside the Union in response to the gay dance. I walked up to the Union to mail some letters and came in contact with what I consider irresponsible behavior on the part of the protesters.
Irresponsible protest
If Kinsey's estimates are correct, 10 percent or more of the world's population is a rather large number. You won't be able to don't think your irresponsible actions will even make a dent in KU's gay population; after all, your idiotic publication of the event intrigued me to go in and I might even go to the next one, it was too much.
Indeed, there was not any sodomy going on and to say that KU sanctions sodomy is to say that KU sanctioned the political violence of the late '60s and early '70s. Surely someone in that so-called Christian group had to realize the ridiculousness of that message.
To the editor:
Secondly, sodomy, in this case, I think, refers to oral sex. Do you people have any idea how long that law has been on the books in this state, or how many states had similar laws and have since repealed them? Wake up and live. This is the 80s.
Other student groups engage in activities at the Union. To disallow one group's activities is blatant discrimination and goes against all I have learned as a Mennonite and an American.
As an optimist, I think this can be the dawning of the age of love and acceptance, providing the so-called Moral Majority does not stick us (members of this liberal college) back into the 17th century. Thank you for fueling the fire and bringing the age closer for us all. As a result, we have to take care of ourselves, one one's race, creed, sex, religion, color, age, origin or ancestry, which is not at all.
Lawrence senior
Timothy Goering
Executed convict knew his fate
Steven T. Judy finally got his wav.
But Steven T. Judy was executed Monday morning in the Indiana state prison's electric chair, only the fourth person to receive the death penalty in over 15 years.
In his 24 years, the only thing he ever got
he all wanted his death. And he almost
didn't.
The Steven Judy story seems at first not to be extraordinary. It's about an angry young man, orphaned, tossed from home to home, in with the wrong bunch of kids, bumming and panking arrow, strung out, into crime and in and out of schools and juvenile "jails" for the past 10 years.
Sounds like a lot of kids that anyone could have known, the types in junior high who were always a bit frightening, who teachers always spoke rather carefully to because these kids were not so brave that the verge of a surprise explosion. They were wild and rowdy and daring, and so much fun.
He was convicted last year in the 1979 rape-strangulation of a 21-year-old Indianapolis woman and the drowning of her three young children. Crime was nothing new to Judy, nor was it going to get caught; but this time, Judy was going to make sure that the punishment was new.
But Steven Judy wasn't fun at all. His angry young man story is real and vivid and more interesting than most of his books.
He demanded throughout his trial that he be sentenced to death, warning the judge and jury that should he be freed someday from prison, and that he would be sentenced. Jury insisted that only death could stop him.
He also knew what his crimes meant to
What makes the Judy story so extraordinary is that he knew. He knew! Judy knew what he was and that he did not have the power to control what he was. He knew, as he said in a news conference a few days before his death, that he was "a very dangerous person." And he said society knew it, too, but "nothing was ever done about it."
society, although they meant nothing much to him at all. He was an uncontrollable killer and rapist, feared by the public, and he knew it. I didn't really matter to him, though; of his last crime, Judy said flatly, "It's just something that happened."
Inhuman? No, quite the contrary. Steven Judy was so human because he faced what he
AMY
HOLLOWELL
was and didn't pretend for a minute that he was something else. He didn't lie, to himself or to others.
Steven Judy was very human, more human probably than most people. He knew what his "human" was all about, he knew that this person was able to limit and that even he had no control over it.
But, ironically, in the name of humanity, some people tried to stop his execution, claiming that it was "cruel and inhuman" to kill him. The young man must instead be rehabilitated.
Because their actions were against his will, because Judy made several impassioned pleas to them to let him die, the ACL finally respected his wishes and abandoned the legal burden. If he really wanted to die, they said, then it was not the ACL's position to intervene.
Despite Judy's initial complaints, the American Civil Liberties Union and a number of religious organizations said they were acting in his behalf to prevent the execution.
Judy's foster parents, Robert and Mary Carr, didn't believe that he really wanted to die, however. They insisted that there was a "loving and kind" person "deep" inside the
vicious "murderer" Steven Judy. His mother said that he was just a "very frightened" young man, who had never received the love he so desperately wanted.
Perhaps love was one of the things he had desperately wanted all his life and never received, but Steven Judy wasn't scared. Not for a amateur. He was nothing but courageous.
For Judy had nothing to fear. He knew exactly what he was and what had to be done about it. He didn't run from it, he didn't hide up in bed before his ugly life and said, "Errough."
Fear for him would have been in not knowing. Therefore life would have been frightful; he was terrifying to others and himself, because he was out of their control and his own. He would never have known what he could do to next, as he testified during his trial when he was 13, at age 13, he committed "12 to 15" raps because he couldn't control himself.
Although he blamed society for never doing anything about his "dangerous person," Judy realized in the end that the final responsibility fell upon him. He was the "dangerous person," and the consequences of his actions were his to do, as he said before his death, "if you did, or, as she said before his death, "what waits for me," but he knew what had to be done about it. He made the choice.
To some, Judy was therefore a coward, electing to die rather than to face his monstrous being everyday. But it seems that Judy would have been a coward to live; in life he was bound to death truly free; in life he would be lying, running from what he thought had to be—his death.
The angry young man had faced himself, had looked his wretchedness in the face. He knew what he was, that he was a rapist and a killer and a menace, a "very dangerous person" that had to be stopped even if it meant his death. Like death, none of it really mattered to him. But unlike most of us, the fact is, Steven Judy knew.
Reagan's boyhood towns remain unchanged
By DAVID PICHASKE
PEORIA, Ill.—Tampcio, Dixon, Galesburg, Monmouth, Eureka—poking around Ronald Reagan's Illinois, one perceives immediately how close to his roots the president is.
New York Times Special Features
The early weeks of the administration have brought hustle and promotion aplenty, but forget the bumper stickers and the chinzy T-shirts. These towns are as solid as silver dollars, were around long before Reagan, and will be around long after he's left Washington. Much longer than Sacramento or Pacific Palisades, they are living embodiments of his vision of America.
In Dixon, from a second-story window of the Nachusa House, Casey Tolly points across the square to the Van Epsmansion: "I lived there as a girl. My first date was Moon Reagan, Dutch's brother. He called me just the other day. Dutch came back here with Louella Parsons. A big reception over in the Community Center. He staved in this hotel."
The Nachua House (1853) is the oldest continuously operating hotel in Illinois, and one of the 10 oldest in America. It may soon be on the state historical register—as are the Van Epss and the Judge Library at McLane's an architect, taken above about a historic district around the courthouse square.
did Abraham Lincoln—in this very room.
Also Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jemmings Eryan, Margaret Fuller, Boss Tweed
would be for Canada on the underground railroad.
The Loveland Community Center, almost as impressive as Nachusa House, is proof that in Dixon, at least, private individuals can be found with the help of a local business for "a community building." furnished in a
suitable manner for pleasure and instruction" (the words are from George C. Loveland's will). The city government stays out, says its mayor as for booze—not allowed. Closed on Sundays.
Eureka, where Reagan attended college,
seemed almost oblivious to his inauguration.
"Ronald Reagan Visitor Center" visible, only the
Ecta Cetera ("treasures around the world and your neighbor's attic"), where volunteers
help with staff Organization and area churches sell thristore items and handicrafts imported directly from underdeveloped countries.
In Eureka, there is still the good life that Ronald Reagan knew: no smog, no crime, no litter. Folks leave cars unlocked, front doors open. It is a dry town, and next to the magazine rack in Rexall Drugs is a stand of religious books.
Like Tampico, Eureka has not changed appreciably since 1932, when Reagan graduated from Eureka College. The businesses in the square, the old homes with their arching trees and broad lawns and the college itself are mostly 1930s vintage, and are well maintained.
The town is not as straight as it seems, however. Rexall stocks Playboy-and who immediately outpace the counter. Immediately outside the culinary two tavers, the Outpost and the Chanticleer.
Saturday at noon, the Outpost is filled with farmers ordering pitchers of beer and large lunches. Rib-eye steak, fries, and salad are $3.99; chicken, fries, lettuce and tomato. $2.69. Their hats, bearing names, fill a table: Amoco, Kent, Supersweet Feeds, the Farm Shop. Two young boys in cowboy hats warty circle a pool table. In a dark corner a young couple in their 20s, both wearing wedding bands, lean toward each other, lost in conversation. She is stunningly attractive, and as he passes to the bar for two more gin-tonicics, someone mutters.
Life unfolds easily in the towns of Ronald Reagan's childhood. What you want, what you need—it there, out front or under the counter, outside city limits. And if the kid from small-town Illinois has become president of the United States, he will be Eureka, then what, really, is so wrong with that?
(David Pichakse, associate professor of English at Bradley University, is writing a book, "Ronald Reagan's Illinois," with Jerry Klein, a Peoria journalism.)
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