27
Tuesday. March 1. 1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
States should recognize homosexual marriages
Once shunned and ridiculed, homosexuals now are becoming an accepted part of our society. However, homosexual couples still are denied a fundamental right enjoyed by heterosexual couples — marriage.
Pope John Paul II recently presented a 100-page letter denouncing same-sex marriages. Although this attitude prevails in the Roman Catholic Church, society has become more accepting of homosexual couples.
States should act accordingly and legally recognize same-sex marriages.
Some states recently have begun to afford homosexuals many of the privileges of marriage, and certain religious groups recognize homosexual couples with ceremonies similar to marriage.
These changes represent increased awareness and acceptance of homosexual couples, but they are not enough. Pseudo-marriages are mere tokens of tolerance. Only by allowing homosexuals to be legally married can homosexual couples be officially recognized.
Homosexuals' love for each other is no less strong or true than the love of heterosexuals. Many homosexuals are committed to spending their lives with their partners. Allowing homosexuals to be legally married formalizes their commitment.
The bond of marriage is more than a title. Legal and financial benefits come with marriage. Homosexuals should not be excluded from enjoying these benefits.
Although many churches do not recognize or accept homosexual couples, church and state are separate. Religious tenets should not dictate state policy. Society's increased acceptance of homosexual couples should alert lawmakers to the need for change. States should now include homosexual couples in the ancient tradition of marriage.
COLLEEN McCAIN FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Clean-needle programs help to combat AIDS
Last week, a Maryland Senate committee began considering a clean-needle program. The program should be implemented.
In clean-needle programs, drug addicts trade their old, dirty needles for new, sterilized ones, reducing the potential for spreading diseases such as AIDS. Although the federal government has banned the programs, they exist in many cities, including New York San Francisco and Boulder, Colo.
Some may say that there is nothing wrong with the deaths of drug addicts. But because addicts come in contact with non-addicts, the problem is worldwide. The Associated Press reported that in New York City, there are more than 200,000 intravenous drug users, and about 50 percent of them are HIV-positive.
Results have so far been positive. Recent studies have indicated that clean-needle programs slow the risk of AIDS. The programs also have not been proven to lead to increased drug use.
More importantly, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the lifetime cost of treating a person with AIDS is $102,000. Because many drug addicts are indigent, the costs eventually get paid for out of the taxpayers' pockets.
Opponents say the programs merely condone drug use. But drugs such as heroin and cocaine will remain illegal. The programs merely attempt to mitigate the health-care problems associated with drug abuse.
Clean-needle programs won't completely stop the spread of AIDS. But anywhere we can reduce it is a victory for everyone.
NATHAN OLSON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
BEN GROVE, Editor
JUSTIN GARBERG Business manager
LISA COSMILLO, Managing editor
TOM EBLEN General manager. news adviser
BILL SKEET, Systems coordinator
JENNIFER BLOWEY Retail sales manager
JEANNE HINES Sales and marketing adviser
Editors
Asst Managing Editor...Dan England
Assistant to the editor...J.K. Claiborne
News...Kristi Fogler, J.R. Cleatonew
Todd Selffelt
Editorial...Colleen McCain
Nathan Olson
Campus...Jess DeHaven
Sports...David Dorsely
Photo...Doug Hesse
Features...Sara Bennett
Wire...Allison Lipper
Freelance...Christine Laue
Business Staff
Campus sales mgr ..Jason Eberly
Regional sales mgr ..Troy Terwater
National and Coop sales mgr ..Robin King
Special sections mgr ..Shelly McConnell
Production mgr ..Laura Guth
Gretchen Kootenbehrelmch
Marketing director ..Shannon Reilly
Creative director ..John Carton
Classified mgr ..Kelly Conneally
Tearehats mgr ..Wing Chan
Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. They must include the writer's signature, name, address and e-mail address number. Writers affiliated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill should use the following format:
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 mailed or brought to the Kansas newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall.
All are trapped in the trenches of an out-of-control race war
I am a POW of the race war.
This war has been going on for thousands of years, ever since Cro-Magnon man bashed in Neanderthal man's head with a rock.
I was drafted at birth when I was issued my white uniform. I had no choice in the matter. I was told all people are equal, just don't trust those different from you.
I was trained in an all-white environment. With no minorities in my grade school, my only basis for an opinion of other peoples was what I heard from the people around me, what I saw on the TV and what I read in the newspaper.
in nigh school, I made my first reconnaissance mission into enemy territory. Northeast Wichita is sometimes referred to as "Brown Town." If you are white, it is a dangerous place, especially after dark. Hostility, real or imagined, oozed down the streets.
I clearly remember the first real skirmish in which I fought. Eight of us football players piled into the back of a pickup truck, armed with bats, fist packs and beer. We spent that Friday evening tearing all over downtown Wichita, alternately chasing small groups of Blacks and running from larger groups of Blacks. No blows
were actually struck.
These same guys were good friends with the Black members of the team and often partied at their homes. Black and white often teamed together to intimidate homosexuals, Northwest High School or just each other. We liked to fight. We didn't really care who we were fighting, we just needed uniforms to tell the enemy apart. Black and white were the easiest. These weren't hate crimes, they were stupid, testosterone-crazed youth crimes, more talk than action.
The night my unit suffered its first casualty is less clear in my memory. Three of us were hanging out in a parking lot on Seneca Street. A fifth of Jim Beam KOed me, and I was passed out in the back of the car.
My two friends were drinking on the trunk, waiting for some girls to return, when five carloads of Black youths pulled up. There was no provocation for their attack. None was needed. Andy ran, leave Mike to be overwhelmed. There was blood on his shoes and pant legs, so we know he was still kicking after they beat him to the ground and were pounding him mercilessly with brass knuckles.
Because of the tensions in Wichita, the ambulance that was sitting 100 feet away would not approach and help until police arrived, even after the attackers left.
Mike would live. He holds no grudge, but the six-foot, 200-pound Marine will always be cautious of large groups of Blacks.
The war heated up. Guns were introduced. Bystanders were involved. Tragedies mounted. Real, senseless hate was the sole motive.
I got scared. I didn't want to kill anyone. I didn't even want to put someone in the hospital. I just wanted to trade a few punches so I would have a good story in school the next day. The kids with guns didn't feel the same way. They carried hatred with them.
I didn't hate people for their race. I was tired of the violence with no face.
only color.
My company had been lucky so far. Our sorrows were minor compared to those who lived in the more heated battlefields of the big cities. Still, I wanted out.
IwentAWOL
I thought I had left the war zone when I came to KU. Little did Ukwon.
Like every war, the race war has its politicians. They fight the war with words while safe from the carriage, making loud proclamations about the rightness of their cause with out any real experience in the trenches.
Crimes are heaped upon me because of my race, and I feel unable to fight back without being labeled racist.
We are all prisoners of this war. Those who preach that ethnicity, nationality or religion define who we are as people have built up the walls of this ideological prison. I, as a human being, hope someday to shed the prison uniform of stereotype and narrow thinking and escape to a land where I am judged on my character and not the shell in which it is housed.
Jacob Arnold is a Wichita Junior In Journalism.
HOW IT IS:
Anti-abortion fanatics going too far
On March 10, 1993 in Pensacola, Fla., David Gunn, an abortion provider, was shot three times in the back as he parked his car behind Pensacola Women's Medical Services during an abortion protest. Last week, Michael Griffin, a Christian fundamentalist, went on trial for the murder.
Five months after the slaying of Gunn, an assailant shot and wounded George Tiller, another abortion provider, at his clinic in Wichita. Rachelle Ranae Shannon, the Oregon woman who has been charged with attempted murder in the incident, called Griffin "the awestorms, greatest hero of our time."
During the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, thieves stole Norway's most famous painting, "Skrik" ("The Scream") by Edward Munch. Days later, an anti-abortion minister said on Oslo radio that the painting would reappear if Norwegian television would air "The Silent Scream," a bizarre, non-factual American anti-abortion film.
Fanatics in the anti-abortion movement, in this country and around the world, are resorting to terrorist tac
tics to achieve their goals. In doing so, they become indistinguishable from common thugs and murderers and deal their cause a serious setback.
The theft of "The Scream," though offensive to most civilized beings, does not belong in the same league as the attempts — one successful, one not — on the lives of Gunn and Tiller. The murder in Pensacola is in many ways a breaking of a psychological barrier that allowed other, similar activities to take place. Now that the so-called "pro-life" movement has a body count, there's no going back. Who can know if Tiller's assailant would have acted had the Florida slaving never taken place?
My fear is that the United States has
seen just the beginning of what is to become a long string of terrorist attacks on women's clinics that will bring to mind IRA bombings in Belfast or the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. For in the mind of the terrorist, there are no innocent victims, and as the psychotics at the fringe of the anti-abortion movement watch their goal of abortion criminalization slip further away, they will see more and more public officials, health care professionals and young women as soldiers in the war over abortion rights. Soldiers to be taken out.
The shootings themselves can be dismissed as the isolated actions of unbalanced lunatics, but far more chilling has been the calm response of America's main anti-abortion groups. The day after Gunn was murdered, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry gave this chilling statement: "While we grieve for [Gunn] and for his widow and for his children, we must also grieve for the thousands of children that he has murdered."
Did you catch that? Little words like "while" and "but" are used by anti-abortion extremists to justify Gunn's
murder. Little conjunctions that couple tepid dismay with clumsily-disguised relief and make such "condemnations" not worth the oxygen it takes to utter them. Why is it so difficult for them to say Gunn's murder is wrong, period, end of discussion? To be fair, "mainstream" anti-abortion groups such as the Catholic Church and National Right to Life did just that. But those groups have, for some reason, relinquished their position in the national debate to the extremists who harass women in front of abortion clinics. By failing in the mid-1980s to curb their dogs, as it were, mainstream opponents of abortion lost credibility and faded into the background.
As Michael Griffin awaits justice in a Florida courtroom, as Rachie Shannon awaits trial in Kansas, as the world awaits the return of Munch's masterpiece, America awaits the next frontal assault from the fringe. May it be merely the loss of another painting, and not the loss of another doctor's life.
Paul Henry is a Tacoma, Wash., graduate student in journalism.
Letter unfairly criticizes Kansan editorial writers
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
In the Tuesday, Feb. 15 issue of the University Daily Kansan California transplant student Nick Pivonka offered up his tense and revelatory, for him perhaps, summation of the newspaper's columnists. To synopsis Pivonka's inspired opinions, the Daily Kansan columnists suck
Pivonka chose specifically to berate the "aimless journalistic wandering" of Alisha Aurora and the other "half-baked ... Dave Berry wannabes" that inhabit the UDK staff. Wow, I'm sure that Pivonka's condemnation just broke those
poor little writer's hearts;
But don't fret, little writer-people, the UDK opinion page is not the "barren wasteland" that Pivonka so eloquently, or maybe I mean "jocularly," declares that it is.
Actually, as the self-styled critic that I (just like Pivonka) am, I rather enjoy the often irreverent, and at times inane, columns that regularly grace the UDK opinion page.
Hell, I even like Alisha. Imagine that. And in writing this letter I never once consulted the thesaurus. I wonder if Pivonka can say the same?
UDK columns almost always (hey, no one's perfect) display a humanness that Pviona apparently can't
Jason Curtis
Staff writer, Sunflower Wichita State University
So UDK columnists, keep doing what you're doing. Somebody appreciates you.
And a little free advice for Pivonka (just in case he one day feels like spouting his "wisdom" again): "save the complaints for party conversation." (Courtesy of Perry Farrell.)
appreciate. When, in the Feb. 14th issue, Danielle Raymond wrote about her cynicism towards love I could relate. And Jacob Arnold's column about friendship and posterity was so true it hurt. I could have written either piece myself.
Priority of University is education, not concerts
I am disgusted that Student Senate would go over budget to fund something with as little educational value as Day on the Hill. Is KU an institute of higher education or merely a concert promotion club? If student funds are going to be wasted on such frivolous things as rock concerts, then the University should refund our student fees so that we can choose our own concerts to go to.
Dan Draes
1.
Hays graduate student