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September 28,1984 Page 4
OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansas (UNS) 626-640 is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Staffer Flint Hall Law, Kansas 6045; daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and three periods. Second class postage paid at Lawn Kansas 6044 Subscriptions by mail are $1 for six months or $2 a year in Duggety County and $1 for six months or $3 a year in Nebraska. MailMaster Send address changes to the University Daily Kansas 118 Staffer Flint Hall Law, Kansas 6045
DON KNOX
Editor
PAUL, SEVART VINCE HESS 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, but 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."
says, this is a human suffering about. 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.
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 hometown, or faculty and staff of 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.
for a computer
You know one of the "friendly" ones.
I've had encounters with some in the past, machines of various types and forms 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 complements of wires and circuits.
As soft as the ware may be, as soon as my fingers touch a keyboard, the unaccaring metal box assails me with bleeps for violating its 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.
There isn't anything wrong with my instincts. Journalists are generally considered human beings by the people who write them, and insults insults we react to as human beings.
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.
It is difficult for me to respect any lifeless object that can instill such panic and terror into mature, intellectual beings upon the utterance of three simple words down.
To the hackers who receive so much elation from triumphing over the processes of these manufactured minds, I say, more power to you.
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 spilt 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 goey 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 met out 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 provides sufficient evidence.
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 role.
The conversation of Steve Imber with
the corporation of the "Faghusters" shirts
should serve to repudiate his claim
that his anti-GLSOK 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 to Lumber's definition, my organization was in no need of these Senate funds and was in fact self-supporting.
supporting. 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.
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.
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
Yes Mr. Imbar, 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 the student to embrace with his feelings of tear and paradox 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?
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, senior
To the end,
Neurotically you seize a Kansas
from the late, missing the
late (with its accompanying
lateball data) the previous even-
ing "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
For the editor:
absence of box scores and standings. Diastolic steadily rising, you dash out and buy a real newspaper, diverse enough to include such bits of trivia
Robert S. Coleman
De Kalb, HL,
graduate student
Source of shame
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 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 U.S. Treasury, which have copyrighted the logo. As much as I regret their mode of expression, I have to support their right of expression.
To the editor:
Likewise. Student Senate financing of GLSOK, and any precedent that financing might set or support, raises no strong feelings within me.
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 ideals as respect for the rights of others, tolerance of various beliefs, and respect for 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 right to differ
A college education should show one her/his own limits and allow one to transclude 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.
Hospitality based upon these differences is defined as bigotry and is just condemned by educated people.
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.
It doesn't matter whether one approves of homosexuals, women, blacks, Hispanics or Jews. Everyone one must recognize one's own limitations and recognize the rights of others to differ.
Jill Robbins Hollywood, Fla. graduate student
To the editor:
Mv suggestion
To the editor:
The current debate over Student Senate financing of Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas is seriously misdirected. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the organizers of the petition to end GLOSK
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 such funding, as it does not answer the whole question an aura of respectibility that it does not deserve.
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 GLOSK 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
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.
Teaching Assistant Department of French & Italian
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 vainglorious self-image, I certainly don't expect this idea to get very far.
Tim Williams
A right to choose
So Thorn Davidson is looking to avoid the referendum on GLSOK funding by biasing the judgment on a valid petition. This is based on Steven Imber's alleged personal opinions and affiliation with a T-shirt drive.
To the editor:
Is Davidson also judging the intent of the other 2,500 people who signed this petition? This is clearly an act of insult because he does prophromosexual sentiment to remove 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 been unaffiliated with the T-shirts, window or bag his telephone?
Tom Crisp Dayton, Ohio, graduate student
Parody continued
In response to the "Fagbusters," shall we continue your little parody? I can't afraid of no fags!
To the editor
Your attitude toward alternative lifestyles merely shows insensitivity, ignorance and prejudice — not to 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