4
Wednesday, July 1, 1992
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FROM THE EDITORS
Supreme Court decision to effect a 24-hour wait restricts women's rights
In an era of progression, the United States is moving backward in time. Every day new technological and scientific discoveries are being made, but as we advance the nation is completely leaving behind the one thing that our country prides itself on the most — freedom.
The Supreme Court's decision Monday to give individual states the power to impose a 24-hour waiting, or "cooling off" period on women before they can obtain an abortion seriously impairs the equal rights of freedom that women have fought to develop and maintain. If this decision is an attempt to preserve women's rights as much as possible, then they are failing miserably. Every stipulation added to the current abortion laws are a serious infringement on women's rights.
Women are entrusted with a vote to help decide the future of the country. They are considered wise enough to become doctors, lawyers, company presidents and much more. And in 1973, Roe vs. Wade granted women complete sovereignty over their bodies. But now, more than twenty years later, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to think that women are too irrational and emotional to make intelligent decisions about their lives and bodies.
What kind of rationale did the justices use to decide that a woman needed one word done rather than her decision?
needed one more day to retrain them.
It took the Supreme Court more than two decades to change its mind about women's rights, and they are still not sure about how they feel. If the justices think women are so irrational and inclined to make poor decisions, then what makes them think that in a mere 24 hours women will be able to change their minds about one of the most important decisions in their lives? If Sandra Day O'Connor thinks that women need a little extra time before undergoing this procedure, fine. She is a woman and therefore entitled to her opinion about what women might need. But who are these eight men who are abusing their power to try and control something that has absolutely nothing to do with them? It seems like the Supreme Court justices are the ones who need a mandatory 24-hour waiting period to rethink their place in society — before they make any more hasty decisions.
Jennifer Bach
TO THE EDITORS
Law professor expresses anger over Kansan's mistake
Imagine my surprise when reading last week's story on gender, race and salary to find a sidebar announcing that I was the second-highest paid faculty member on the Lawrence campus. Three summers ago, when I left the deanship here, I was nowhere near the highest-paid person in the school. Either some of my senior and more productive colleagues had suffered badly at the hands of the new dean, or the Kausan had blown the story.
A quick check confirmed my suspicions. In what can only be regarded as a self-parody of its ability to cover serious matters, the *Kansan* has cited as the second-highest paid faculty member on campus the fifth-highestpaid faculty member in his own academic unit. No budgetary tricks; those are the facts. You can look it up. You could even have looked it up before you printed the story.
I have no idea what might be the gender and race of the highest-paid faculty members on the campus. Neither does Mr. David Wilson or the Kansan staff.
Michael Davis professor of law
Women faculty do not receive the incentive to remain at KU
In addition to the excuses given in the July 26 article regarding the 10 highest-paid professors at the University of Kansas, two other reasons keeping women off this list must be considered. The University has not aggressively sought to retain high-ranking, senior women professors who have been lured to other institutions by offers of high salary and other professional advantages. The University also has failed to ensure that women professors are named to distinguished professorships and other endowed positions. In the past 14 years, I have observed a continuous exodus of highly qualified women faculty from the humanities and social and behavioral sciences that has not been matched by efforts to recruit women for senior-level positions. And anyone walking by 220 Strong Hall can observe how few women are included in the ranks of distinguished professors.
Susan Kemper, professor of psychology
KANSAN STAFF
JUSTIN KNUPP
Editor
KIM CLAXTON Business manager
JENNIFER BACH Managing editor
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Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. They must include the writer's signature, name, address and telephone number. Writers affiliated with the University of Kansas must include class and homeetown, or faculty or staff position. Guest columns should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The writer will be photographed. The Kansas reserves the right to reject or edit letters, guest columns and cartoons. They can be emailled or brought to the Kansas newsroom, 111 Stuart-Flint Hall.
Opening Social
Raised Center on West Campus. The center's anticipated opening is in the fall of 1993. Construction workers are putting on the brick facade on the outside of the theater. The new building will help take the place of Hoch Auditorium and share the event load at Craftsmanship Theatre.
Stephen Pinery / KANSAN
Opening Soon
English — sometimes you have to break the rules; usually you just follow the exceptions
Ever since Dan Quayle's "Potato-Gate" scandal, I've been reading and hearing a lot of smug, self-righteous remarks about what an idiot the vice president must be to have misspelled such an elementary word. Well, perhaps for the only time in my life, I must come to Mr. Quayle's defense. He may be an idiot, but it has nothing to do with his spelling capabilities.
Kate Kelley Staff Columnist
Spelling in American English is the most frustrating, incomprehensible, illogical, and inane practice that exists in our culture. And yes, I had to look up all those words to spell them correctly. I have an awful time with spelling. Our spelling rules make no sense and, more often than not, are broken anyway.
Grade school phonics reveal to us that each letter of the alphabet can symbolize at least two sounds, some of them silent, but meaningful nonetheless. Then we're told to sound out the letters as we learn to
read words. OK, which sounds? So, we're given the "rules." A silent 'e' at the end of a word indicates the previous vowel will carry its long sound. So we have came, code, line — potato? No, that's one of the exceptions. You just have to remember that.
How about come, some, worse? We continue to add to the list of exceptions that we just have to memorize. Then there are the silent bs, gs, ls, ts and which make no sense at all. Worst of all is that "i" before e' except
after half the words you may need to spell rule.
it is no wonder the following misunderstanding occurred. A friend of mine who teaches second graders had spent the morning teaching her students the phonetics of 'wh' and silent e.' That afternoon she had them write letters to soldiers at Desert Storm. One youngster, keeping in mind his earlier lesson, wrote, "Dear soldier, I hope you don't have a whore."
War, whore, both can kill you, but one is certainly more honorable a death than the other!
Much of the problems with our spelling rules is that our words come from so many different languages. Instead of Americanizing the spelling, as we do the pronunciations, we just say it "laf" and spell it "laugh". When my great-grandfather emigrated from Norway, he walked into Ellis Island with the name Dissederssen. After
being convinced he would be forced ad nausea to spell it in banks, hospitals and over the phone, he walked out with the name Davis, Americanized and easy to spell.
If we are to criticize Mr. Quayle, it should be for allowing himself to in the situation of spelling in public I know my limitations. There are two events in which I never participate, beauty pageants and spelling bees. And as I'm leery of those who do compete, I don't judge such contests either.
Because spelling involves memorizing almost every word independent of rules and formulas, I firmly believe one can either be a great speller, or have a life. Mr. Quayle and I, at least on this one issue, have made the same choice.
Kate Kelley is a Ft. Leavenworth junior majoring in English
With Cold War over, U.S. government should release POW and other sensitive documents
As Boris Yeltsin met with three Kansas MIA families in Wichita recently, I thought about how his disclosure confirmed the testimony of former National Security Agency employees Jerry Mooney and Terrel Minarcin. Last year, they told Senator Kerry's POW Committee that Americans captured in Vietnam were moved to the Soviet Union. Senator McCain of Arizona led the Bush administration's efforts to dismiss these two NSA electronic intelligence specialists as a couple of cranks.
Mike
The television networks and the news services ignored Minarcin and Mooney at the time. The national media hasn't exactly scrambled to interview them since Yeltsin's visit. On June 22, the Los Angeles Times reported documents found at Tambooville, a city southeast of Moscow, showed that 2,500 foreign POWs, including Americans, were received there after the end of World War II. Itar-Tass, the Russian news agency, reported that local residents verified that the prisoners referred to in the documents actually arrived and were imprisoned in these labor camps. Our own Lawrence newspaper carried only the AP wire report that the delegation headed by Bush's man Malcom Toon had found no evidence that any Americans had ever been held in the old Soviet Union.
Caron
Guest
Columnist
Far more politically explosive for George Bush are the similar revelations these and other congressional witnesses made about POWs moved to China. Bush was Richard Nixon's liaison to the People's Republic. He resided in Beijing at the time when American POWs are reported to have been transferred to China. Some Americans were captured inside China. As I am writing this, former President Nixon is on his way to a Dole fund-raiser in Wichita. He will boast about his expertise in international matters. Some of my Vietnam veteran friends will be there to ask
him how many captured Americans were written off as part of the cost of his "brilliant" China strategy.
Bomber crews were caught in Chinese air space, trying to elude Haniou's south-directed radar. An Albatross seaplane was almost certainly caught off the coast of Hainan Island trying to keep other Americans from falling into Chinese hands. It is now public record that U.S. Army Special Forces teams and other personnel from the Marines and Navy ran reconnaissance and command missions for the CIA in Yunnan, Wangsi, and Kwangtung provinces inside China's border with North Vietnam and Laos. Personnel losses from these operations still are classified.
As the Nixon administration's liaison to China, Bush discussed these sensitive POW matters with the Chinese Later, as CIA chief, Bush told Congress no evidence existed that the Chinese had ever held any American POWs. His real politics following the Tiananmen Square massacre have roots in a past that is closely associated with Nixon's notions of international diplomacy. Bush also asserted that no prisoners of war were kept in Vietnam or Laos after the war. Those
who paid attention to the Senate POW hearings this week can judge the truth of that statement for themselves.
Now that the Soviet secret files on POWs are open to the world, isn't it time the American public demanded access to our own POW archives? A Seattle Times reporter, Mark Sauter, tried to obtain documents on POWs in the Korean War form the Eisenhower Library in Abilene. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scrowcott, personally called the library to intervene. My own request for re-evaluation of seals on 35-year-old documents at the Eisenhower Library and similar materials still unavailable at the Truman Library have not been resolved after nearly a year of bureaucratic stalling. The Cold War era provided an excuse for the restriction of these materials. But today, when the Soviet and Eastern Block archives are increasingly available to the world, our own government's attempt to keep the lid on even these documents from the '40s and '50s is feeding the fires of well-founded public distrust.
Mike Caron is a graduate student
Loco Locals
ISTAUROR WILTOCATE
LASTNIGHT.FRAIMED TOUCH
NINTH KIDD.JOCIALOTOF
COFFEE MAGGIE.MAG...AND
IAM PAGET.AWAKE.WHAKEN OVER
TIMEABOUT CAFEFINE,
ADAM? How?
by Tom Michaud