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September 28, 1984 Page 4
OPINION
KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
DON KNOX
Editor
The University Dayan Kaiser (USPS 605-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Staffer Flint Hall Lawrence, Kan. 6045, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Second class postage付陆 Lawrence, Kan. 6044 Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $24 if a year in Dingham County and $18 for six months or $35 if a year in Fulton County. MasterSEN MASTER Send address changes to the University Dayan Kaiser, 118 Staffer Flint Hall Lawrence, Kan. 6045
PAUL SEVART VINCE IESS Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM Campus Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER Business Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
LYNNE STARK MARY BERNICA Retail Sales National Sales Manager Manager
JILL GOLDBLATT Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Liquor law reform
Kansas has been unfairly maligned by the rest of the nation for many things it cannot change, such as its weather and topography. But the state takes some well-deserved lumps for many of the anachronistic characteristics that persist out of a stubborn resistance to change. None of these characteristics are so blatantly out of step with the 20th century as its liquor laws.
Gov. John Carlin recently announced his intent to push for liquor by the drink in the next legislative session. He says his motives are economic; businesses, tourists and conventions are put off by a state that requires anyone who wants to buy a drink at a bar to have a club membership at that bar.
If the state wants to grow, Carlin said, the state must change its laws. Oklahoma voters have done away with their state's restrictive liquor laws, and Kansas is now one of only three states in the nation without liquor by the drink.
Legislative leaders are quick to point out that liquor by the drink has little chance in the next session, with or without Carlin's support. Carlin says he wants to take the emotion out of the issue, to keep it purely economic, and lobbyists like the Rev. Richard Taylor, head of Kansans for Life at Its Best!, won't let that happen. "This is not a political issue," Taylor says, "this is a human suffering issue."
Kansans are not suffering much to get into bars, however. Liberal laws governing reciprocal agreements between clubs have allowed holders of some club cards almost unlimited access to clubs statewide. Carlin says that passing liquor by the drink would only be acknowledging what already exists. He's right.
...y exists. It's right. The state may always take some criticism for the things it cannot change, but it can no longer afford to be a laughingstock for the things it can.
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and homeschool, or family or office of the Kansan. The Kansan also invites individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
Pot Shots
Please — someone introduce me to a nice computer.
free computer
You know, one of the "friendly" ones.
You know, one of the "friendly" ones I’ve had encounters with some in other forms and in the cases that others said were "user-friendly," but with me, they all turned a mean interface.
I'll admit it. I've got a chip on my shoulder when it comes to these massive conglomerations of wires and circuits.
As soft as the ware may be, as soon as my fingers touch a keyboard, the uncaring metal box assails me with bleeps for violating it's sacred syntax.
I know I should learn to value and respect the bits and bytes that are
becoming BASIC to our society, but I intend to avoid any disk that flops for as long as possible.
It is difficult for me to respect any lifeless object that can instil such panic and terror into mature, intellectual beings upon the utterance of three simple words.
My first instinct is to strike back when I read the letters to the editor that I find stuffed in the editorial editor's mailbox or lying on his desk. The next instinct is to find some basis upon which I can attack the credibility and/or intelligence of the letter writer. That usually isn't hard to do. There's always a misspelled word or name, a fact that isn't quite right, some rationalization loophole.
To the hackers who receive so much elation from triumphing over the processes of manufactured minds, I say, more power to you.
There isn't anything wrong with my instincts. Journalists are generally considered human beings by the people who work with them. Our insults us, we react to human beings.
I'll be content watching the computer craze from the outside, letting others tangle with terminals, printers and mainframes, and secretly hoping that I never have to deal with anything more complex than a bank card machine.
But I finally come up against the hard
cold fact that someone didn't like what I had to say and wasn't swayed by the way I said it. What really hurts is that the letter intruded into my personal domain, the words that I wrote.
I know that the way I feel when I read a letter about one of my columns is the way some readers feel when their lives, problems or values are spilled across the newspaper pages. I know just how unpleasant that can be. But I also know that that's the only way we've figured out how to do it.
If we remember that, and overcome our instincts, we might even be able to learn something.
Dried up chewing gum, leftover remains of the gooey stuff, stuck to the underside of the desk, is mighty distasteful.
In grade school, the fear of getting caught chewing gum is often what moves a student to stick it underneath the desk when his teacher appears.
Better that than being reprimanded or having to write an essay on 'Why I should'
In high school, discipline for the infraction was more productive.
An hour spent removing wads large and small; fresh and stale; and pink, white and gray from the under side of a roomful of desks, often reformed the gum-chewer.
But unfortunately, such punishment was not meted in sufficient amounts in younger years or the exercise's rehabilitative value is short-lived.
One look under a few desks in a classroom or lecture hall on campus
Yet the issue, while occasionally a sticky one, is not without solution.
If you must chew gum in KU buildings, get some extra mileage out of your newspaper, out of this page.
When you have finished chewing your gum, tear off a corner of the Kansan, wrap your used gum in it and deposit the wad in a trash can.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
'Fagbusters' T-shirts cause campus controversy
To the editor
To the vowel.
The connection of Steve Imber with the threat of the "Faghesters" shirts should serve to repudiate his claim that his anti-GLOSO funding petition was motivated purely by financial considerations.
Futhermore, as has been pointed out by Jeff Miller in the Kansan, (Sept. 25, letter), the petition is clearly discriminatory in that it applies to only one student group. I have been a member of a student athletic club whose members raised over $17,000 in one year. The same year this club received $1,000 from the Student Senate for equipment purchases. According toember's definition, my organization was in no need of these Senate funds and was in fact self-supporting.
support that.
Why then does Mr. Imber's petition affect only one student group? Because the membership of that group is mostly homosexual. The petition is an expression of the ignorance, intolerance and insensitivity of its drafters and signers.
Any student group has a right to access the funds generated by the student activity fee. If a group of heterosexuals was to form in order to
provide support for its members, this group would have equal access to Senate funds. Such a group is not likely to form because the members of the heterosexual community are not subjected to the prejudice and violence that is met by the homosexual community. People who suffer from such abuse are going to organize. There is strength in numbers. There are black student organizations, oh, but it is no longer fashionable nor safe to pick on blacks.
Yes Mr. Imber, it is 1984 now and you may have to work with a black person in class, you may have to look upon a woman as an equal, and you may have to live with Student Senate funding for homosexuals. I wish that I could sympathize with the feelings of paranoia that must torture you.
But, somehow, I feel that it would do you some good to have your little conservative white boy view of the world shattered. Tolerance and justice may be two words that hold little meaning for you, Mr. Imber, but I suggest that you try to discover what they mean.
Where, oh where, are the Cubs?
James E. Mitchell
Coeur d'Elena, Idaho, senior
To the editor
Neurotic, you seize a Kansas from the pile, having missed the late, with its accompanying email data) the previous evening. "What of the Cubbies?" you ask, Alas, the sports editor has destined you to ignorance, citing "lack of space" to explain the
James E. Mitchell
To the editor:
absence of box scores and standings. Diatoxic steadily rising, you dash out and buy a real newspaper, diverse enough to include such bits of trivia.
Robert S. Coleman
De Kale, Ill.
graduate student
Source of shame
To the editor:
I am greatly troubled, though, by the intolerance shown to this group of people by those responsible for designing, printing and distributing the "Fagbusters" T-shirt. My opposition is not based on legal grounds, though much talk has been given to possible legal remedies initiated by the Fagbusters' headquarters, which have copyrighted the logo. As much as I regret their mode of expression, I have to support their right of expression.
Likewise, Student Senate financing of GLSOK, and any precedent that financing might set or support, raises no strong feelings within me.
The purpose of this letter is neither to support nor oppose the existence of GLSOK on the Lawrence campus. I have no strong feelings about the issue.
I do object, though, to the extreme insensitivity and poor taste that the manufacture and sale of the T-shirt represents. In a university where such lofty ideas as respect for the rights of others, tolerance of various cultures, and acceptance of diverse ideas are a source of pride, this incident has been a source of shame.
I take a great deal of pride in the University of Kansas and in the quality of the students that represent it. I sincerely believe that this activity is not representative of the feelings of the majority of KU students. We owe ourselves more respect than that.
John Urkevich Kansas City, Kan., graduate student
A college education should show one her/his own limits and allow one o transcend those limits through an appreciation of other individuals and other cultures. College shows us that people are different: they have different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, they are of different genders, and they have different sexual orientations and preferences.
I was first outraged, then saddened, when I learned of the existence of "Fagbusters" T-shirts on the KU campus. This type of propaganda is, I believe, inappropriate at an institution of higher learning.
Hositiity based upon those differences is defined as bigotry and is justly condemned by educated people.
A right to differ
It doesn't matter whether one approves of homosexuals, women, blacks. Hispanics or Jews. Eventually one must recognize one's own limitations and recognize the rights of others to differ.
Jill Robbins Hollywood, Fla. graduate student
To the editor:
My suggestion
To the editor:
The current debate over student Senate financing of Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas is seriously misdirected. Despite their protests to the contrary, the organizers of the petition to end GLSOK
Student government, like any government, should concern itself only with those tasks the performance of which is vital to the common interest I object to Senate funding of GLSOK not because of the different moral standards of its members, but because the funding of a counseling service for homosexuals has nothing to do with the responsibilities of government. Though a Republican, I would equally object to Senate funding of College Young Republicans, or any other group with a private outlook and no connection with the vital common interest.
funding are obviously concerned (and I believe rightly so) with the moral implications of such funding. But it is hardly necessary to debate morality in order to fault the logic of funding USS Osaka, a whole question an aura of respectibility that it does not deserve.
It is a shame that our blowblow student senators feel they must parody the ubiquitous federal government in their fiscal obsessions. Restraint is the better part of wisdom.
Tim Williams
My suggestion: determine what percentage of Student Senate funding supports activities which are absolutely vital to the common welfare, then eliminate everything else the Senate does and reduce the Student Activity Fee by an equal percentage. Given the Student Senate's vanguardous self-image, I certainly don't expect this idea to get very far.
Teaching Assistant
Department of French & Italian
To the editor:
A right to choose
So Thom Davidson is looking to avoid the referendum on GLSOK funding by biasing the judgment on a valid petition. This is based on Steve Imber's alleged personal opinions and affiliation with a T-shirt drive.
Is Davidson also judging the intent of the other 2,500 people who signed this petition? This is clearly an oppressive move by the people of Kentucky to restore the right of KU students to choose in this matter.
Let's face it, they were looking for an excuse to take away our freedom of choice and they found one. What would they have done if Imbar had taken them with the T-shirts, peek in his bedroom window or bag his telephone?
Tom Crisp Dayton, Ohio. graduate student
Parody continued
To the editor:
to the editor!
In response to the "Fagbusters," shall we continue your little parody?
I am not afraid of no fags!
Your attitude toward alternative lifestyles merely shows insensitivity, ignorance and prejudice — not that you should be proudly displayed on one's chest.
Perhaps the funds generated from your T shirt sales should be allotted to GLSOK. They at least deserve the money you're making by exploiting the issue of their student funding by Student Senate.
Heather Bussing Manhattan sophomore