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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
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D. B.
Wednesday, March 5, 1986
NCAA out of tune
A rap song about our victorious Jayhawks has gotten lost in the shuffle of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, and it is still unclear what tune the proper officials will be singing when all the options are sorted out.
What is clear is that the giant bureaucracy governing collegiate athletics is applying needless rules to a harmless situation.
The song in question is the "Jayhawk Shuffle." It was written by a local club owner and uses the names of the Jayhawks' five starters and some reserve players.
According to the NCAA, a player's name cannot be used for commercial purposes. That rule probably was designed to keep schools or outside agencies from exploiting college athletes.
Eligibility shouldn't be questioned when a person or agency, in no way connected with University, uses the success of the players to obtain commercial gain.
But the NCAA rule needlessly duplicates civil laws that keep people from making money by using the names or likenesses of others without permission.
If Ron Kellogg or Calvin Thompson or any of the other players don't like people making money from their talent, let them hire lawyers and sue the profiteers for a share of the take.
But their eligibility should not be at stake since they've done nothing but play really fine basketball.
Tribute to turtles
A group of sixth graders from Caldwell Elementary School is slowly but surely gaining support as it debuts as a legislative lobbyist, and it's pulling for a pretty good cause.
These 11- and 12-year-old politicos are pushing the Kansas Legislature to pass a bill designating the ornate box turtle as the official state rentile
The box turtle — technically Terrapene ornata, Agassiz — is the perfect choice for Kansas' state reptile, and the legislators would do well to seriously consider the students' request.
According to a KU zoologist, the ornate box turtle is harmless, easily recognizable and found in all 105 counties in the state.
It doesn't appear that the sixth-graders' suggestion has anyone riled up. No one has countered yet with a favorite snake or lizard nominee.
The thousands of Kansas citizens that can remember keeping a pet box turtle as a child should add their names as supporters of the bill.
The students are working zealously by writing letters, making posters and selling T-shirts to drum up support for their lobbying effort.
In the meantime, Larry Miller, the sixth-grade teacher at Caldwell, has found an innovative and interesting way to teach his students a first-hand lesson in how the state government works.
The legislators have a lot more important and demanding issues to deal with, but it wouldn't hurt to listen to the pleas of a group of young future voters.
It is time the ornate box turtle was properly distinguished as the Kansas reptile of record.
Church hand too heavy
The institutional Roman Catholic Church has been harassing dissenters. In response, 1,000 Catholics placed an advertisement in the Sunday New York Times to express their solidarity with the dissenters. This courageous stand should be applauded.
Ninety-seven leading Catholic scholars, religious and social activists signed this original statement.
The harassment stemmed from an October 1984 advertisement, also placed in the Times, stating that there was a diversity of opinion among American Catholics on the subject of abortion.
It also stated that only 11 percent of American Catholics surveyed in a 1984 study disapproved of abortion in all circumstances.
The statement confirmed that a large number of Catholic theologians regard abortion as a matter of moral choice, tragic though it may be.
According to Sunday's advertisement, signers have been threatened with dismissal from their orders if they do not retract. Academi-
cians have been denied the right to teach or lecture at Catholic colleges. Others have been denied participation in programs and have been harassed in their workplaces.
There can be no place for such totalitarianism in a free society. While any church may legitimately play a role in guiding its members on political and social issues, reprisals against dissenters should not be tolerated.
Catholices have the right to free speech and to full participation in the U.S. political system. The attempt to control Catholic thinking is exactly what people feared when John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy proved those fears were unfounded.
Catholics who differ from the official church stance on difficult issues should be able to speak freely without fear of reprisal. As it said in the advertisement, "The ties which unite the faithful are stronger than those which separate them. Let there be unity in what is necessary, freedom in what is doubtful and charity in everything."
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Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words and should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position. Guest shots should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 700 words. The
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Take Mandela, for example. The
Time could have saved a lot of space by simply including the first three in the terrorist category.
Time magazine named Mikhail Gorbachev, the terrorist, Nelson Mandela and Bob Geldof as runners-up for "Man of the Year," finally given to Deng Xiaoping, premier of China.
Ethiopia, Afghanistan ignored
Not only is such reporting irresponsible, it is wrong, ethically and morally.
Media biased in S. Africa coverage
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he needs them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
So said Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1807.
If Jefferson were alive today, he probably would include broadcast news in that most insightful observation.
The American public has bestowed its trust in the media to report fairly and accurately the events occurring around the world. But the media doesn't.
For example, the media have yet to report the horrors of what's going on in Afghanistan and Ethiopia with the same vigor as they've reported the situation in South Africa.
South Africa offered to release Mandela if he be renounced violence. He held that he had been innocent.
media call him a hero and demand that the South African government release him.
The truth is that Mandela is a confessed and convicted saboteur who is sentenced to life in prison. He was found guilty of four acts of sabotage June 11, 1964.
He still is considered the leader of the outlawed African National Congress which is run by the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.
In his "I Am Prepared to Die" statement Mandela said, "I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage." He also said he had been influenced by Marxist thought.
Bartholomew Hlapane, a former member of both the Central Committee of the South African Communist
Even Amnesty International won't work for Mandela's release because it says the definition of "prisoner of conscience" does not apply to him.
Mandela recently told Washington Times columnists John Lofton and Cal Thomas that communism "gives equal opportunity to everyone." However, he failed to mention that everyone would also be equally miserable.
Victor Goodpasture Staff columnist
Party and the National Executive Committee of the ANC, in 1982 told a Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, that the communists controlled the ANC financing and military operations. He also said arms were supplied by the Soviet Union.
The Soviets admit that they are financing and arming the ANC. This is a deadly serious situation — ask any Ethiopian still alive — yet the media continues to ignore it.
Hlapane said he left the Communist Party and the ANC because he became disillusioned with them.
Predictably, the media ignored his testimony.
On Dec. 16, 1982, he and his wife were murdered and one of his daughters was paralyzed. Again, nothing in the New York Times or Washington Post about the tragedy.
One story concerned 15 South
One of the most flagrant breaches of journalistic integrity on the African situation occurred on Dec. 4, 1985.
Africans who were killed in riots two weeks earlier. A second story reported that Ethiopian government policies of starvation and/or forced relocation resulted in 100,000 deaths
Both stories were available over The Associated Press and Reuters wire services.
The New York Times put the first story with a three-column photo on page one. The Ethiopia story was given half the amount of space on page 14 with no photo. Apparently the Times doesn't think as much of 100,000 Ethiopians as it does of 15 South Africans.
The Baltimore Sun also put the South Africa story on the front page. However, the Ethiopians were bumped to page three and given much less space.
South Africa also was on the Washington Post's front page, but the second story wasn't mentioned at all. As far as the Post was concerned, the pain, suffering and deaths of 100,000 Ethiopians never occurred.
This is a clear case of the media changing history, and the sad part is that this is not an isolated incident. This kind of reporting occurs every day.
That could explain why Americans have a distorted view of the current world situation.
Dinosaurs scrammed in cold-weather huff
A new fossil site in Canada is reported to provide the best evidence yet that many animal species were wiped out by catastrophes that occurred during the Dinosaur Age. But maybe it's only the best evidence yet that human scientists have been extraordinarily slow in learning what happened to the dinosaurs.
I have long contended there is a big difference between being ignorant and being stupid. One - ignorance-
A dinosaur accustomed to an African-like climate would be more than a little dismayed to find itself in Canada.
implies a lack of knowledge. The other — stupidity — implies a mental inability to grasp that knowledge in the first place.
Everybody is ignorant of something, either through accident or design. The sum of knowledge simply has become too large for any one brain to grasp, regardless of how well informed a person might be.
Oh, sure, there have been all sorts of theories about why the giant reptiles disappeared. But theory and proof aren't synonyms, you know, any more than ignorance and stupidity are.
We all have to forgo learning something, but I am convinced that dinosaurs have been short-ended.
The most recent theory I've come across postulates that dinosaurs vanished after a meteor shower kicked up climate-changing dust storms.
To give science the benefit of the doubt, that theory was advanced more in ignorance than stupidity.
Although I am ignorant totally insofar as biology, geology and paleontology are concerned, that doesn't
Dick West
United Press International
keep me from offering my own theory.
I theorize that dinosaurs simply didn't survive the separation of the earth's continental plates.
True, the fossils include primitive crocodiles and sharks, but other prehistoric creatures will have to bend for themselves. At the moment, I'm on the trail of missing dinosaurs.
Consider the discovery in Nova Scotia of North America's richest fossil site. Sedimentary rocks, of the type previously overlooked by scientists, are estimated to contain more than 100,000 fragments of fossilized bone.
Short of putting their pictures on milk cartons, I have nowhere to turn but to the National Geographic Society.
Let's examine what caused all those rifts in the earth's crust.
According to a Geographic news release, valleys from Canada all the way down to the Carolinas were created "when the North American and African continental plates, which were once a part of one giant landmass, started to pull apart."
It stands to reason that a dinoaur
accustomed to an African-like
climate would be more than a little
dismayed to find itself in Canada
instead. Particularly in the winter.
Even the weather as far south as Virginia might have been a bit rigorous for the giant reptiles. So they crawled into the valleys to keep warm.
To me, that seems more rational than speculation that the earth was pelled by objects from outer space.
Dinosaurers aren't groundhogs, you know. Once they saw their shadows, they may have assumed the weather was like that all year round and suffered heart attacks.
Mailbox
Questionable voting
On Feb. 27, I attended the Students Against Multiple Sclerosis lip-sync contest at Cogburns. It was my understanding upon entering the bar that everyone paying the donation-cover charge would be entitled to one vote for his favorite impersonation.
These vote cards were given out as freely as pizza coupons at a basketball game, and some people were busily working on stacks of 50 or more.
What I found inside was nothing less than anarchy. Three times preceding the contest, I was given an official-looking vote card printed with the words "One dollar equals one vote."
This was not a contest of money-raising ability and lip-sync talent, but a competition to see which of a very few contestants and their friends could amass the largest amount of vote cards.
I realize that in the end all of the money goes to multiple sclerosis. But how does it feel to be the contestant who is denied a possible trip to the Bahamas by flagrant ballot-box stuffing?
I would like to know what determines which of the votes are legitimate since obviously more votes were cast than dollars.
Scott R. Wallace Overland Park sophomore
Theology for women
And when it comes time again to raise money for the same or another charity, the losers will be the people who would have benefited from the funds.
Ruether's ideas were not "anti-intellectual ravings," she did not
After reading Timothy J. Williams' letter concerning the Rosemary Radford Ruether lecture, I was wondering whether or not I had been there.
ridicule "everything associated with Christianity" nor did she advocate "the worship of pagan godesses as more appropriate than Christianity for women."
The male domination of Western religious practice has suppressed the original equality inherent in Biblical teachings, which Ruieth stated was prevalent in goddess-centered religions.
In fact, Ruether suggested that the Bible contains excellent examples of social criticism and historical transformation.
She suggested that by a "recontextualization" of scripture, the valuable contributions of women in the Western religious traditions will be revealed, renewing and creating roles that are not secondary to men's roles, but of equal value and benefit.
The primary focus of this proposal is to demonstrate the need to compel women into an active and concerted effort to reinstate not only traditional ethical values but to pursue an equal participation in the legislative process that affects the practice of their religious beliefs.
It is the fullest intention of feminist theologians such as Ruether to secure freedom of religion for every woman, primarily as a moral necessity, and finally as a demonstration of a spiritual reality.
Ruether observes this reality in extra-Western religious traditions. These traditions should be explored to create a dynamic resynthesis of transcultural values and symbols of unity.
Finally, feminist theology acknowledges the capacity of all women for ethical statement and spiritual encounter.
Glenn E. Gunnels
Wichita senior
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