Letters
LETTERS to the Editor No Payment Enclosed Andrea Ayvazian's "No Payment Enclosed" (April issue) reminded me of many of my own feelings and experiences as a war-tax resister. Since I began...
...Russell Parsons East Fairfield, Vermont <Roe> Must Stand In response to your March issue editorial, "Roe Must Stand," your April issue contains four intemperate, ill-informed letters opposing a women's right to choose what to do about an unwanted pregnancy...
...Not only did The Washington Post, in its zeal for bottom-line profits, break the Pressmen's Union in Washington, it also set the tone for newspaper publishers across the country to step up the pressure for givebacks...
...Finally, Collum does the Jewish-identified Left a disservice by giving exclusive coverage to Michael Lerner and his important magazine Tikkun...
...The anti-choice movement represents, in the main, the fundamentalist, conservative fringes of Christianity and Judaism which marry their "mandatory motherhood" ideology to their opposition to ordaining women and to the Equal Rights Amendment...
...But to cite the Los Angeles disc jockey who burned Cat Stevens albums as an example of censorship was perverted...
...During the 1980s, their hard-won rights have been constantly undermined—by whom...
...19:31-38), and self-castration (Matt...
...Collum's coreligionists, and not just from the Right...
...However, Lynch portrays the military's witch hunt as an aberration in a general public climate of acceptance of lesbians and gay men...
...Perhaps the following quotation from a New York Times editorial, cited in his column, offers a clue to what we can do to combat this threat: "Evenhanded prosecution would put much of official Washington in prison...
...The only exception made is for scholars who examine the magazine at USIA offices in Washington...
...Corporations are neither pro- nor anti-union...
...Let's face it-no honest, sensible person uses the "abortion is murder" argument, which is nothing but a tawdry appeal to unthinking emotionalism...
...Destroying a record or book one has purchased as a statement of feeling about the work or its author is an act of free speech that should be stoutly defended...
...Edgar J. Lawrence Dayton, Ohio Heartfelt thanks for your editorial, "Roe Must Stand...
...Isaacson-Jones Reproductive Health Services St...
...The contention that white males "tend to major in" racism is the kind of stereotypical wisecrack that gets jerks like Jimmy the Greek in trouble...
...Catholics and conservative Protestants oppose free choice in the matter of abortion not because they love life (Cardinal Bernardin's great obfuscation about "the seamless garment of life" notwithstanding) but because their atrocious god hurls the souls of unbaptized babies into the flames of hell...
...Where he gets this idea is beyond me...
...Joe Felmet Winston-Salem, North Carolina Politics of Race Your editorial on "Politics of Race" (Comment, March issue) makes some surprisingly stupid statements which may illustrate the difficulties faced by the Democratic Party as it attempts to recover from the 1988 Presidential election...
...In my view, companies that maximize bonuses and profits at the expense of workers and their unions deserve the label "anti-union...
...Is Frank Lorenzo "neither pro- nor antiunion" when he takes an airline into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has it emerge nonunion...
...That some people on the "religious Left" oppose choice is really of minor significance...
...I encourage each person who works for peace and justice to give serious consideration to this form of direct action...
...Therefore, corporations usually prefer weak to strong unions...
...Phillip Schick Columbus Web Pressmen's Union No...
...Ed Doerr Americans for Religious Liberty Silver Spring, Maryland Danny Duncan Collum gives an unintentionally misleading picture of the Jewish Left by using the overly broad term "religious Left" when it is really the Christian Left he is referring to...
...I find it more than slightly hypocritical that the teachings of the Bible are used to persecute gays when the same book condones child-slavery for prostitution (Num...
...You are unnecessarily generous in giving them space the way you did in the April issue...
...Since I began refusing to pay Federal taxes in 1970 as a personal and political act of nonviolent civil disobedience, I have seen war-tax re-sisters redirect hundreds of thousands of dollars away from the military to meet immediate human needs...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...Members of our staff enjoyed a productive conversation around several of the powerful and important points you made...
...With such publicity, we may be able to force more evenhanded and less selective prosecution...
...But no, no American can subscribe to Amerika because the USIA says it is not allowed to propagandize Americans...
...Ken Clark San Francisco, California Danny Duncan Collum tries to leave the impression that the "religious Left" is largely unfriendly to freedom of conscience on abortion...
...19:12), to name but a few sexual enormities supported and ordered by the Christian god...
...Unlike the Christian Left, the Jewish Left—more properly, the Jewish-identified Left—is not composed primarily of "religious" individuals, and so Jewish-identified Leftists do not focus on "acts of moral witness...
...I, for one, am sickened by the reception accorded self-styled leftists whose hobby horse is rejection of democracy for women based on a putative protection of a "population" that has, itself, never registered a single complaint...
...He is wrong...
...The bedrock of American society is economic self-interest...
...For The Progressive to incorporate this nonsense into a policy suggestion for a major political party only shows that some on the Left would rather waste our time and energy on irrelevant bickering than think seriously about the challenges that confront the working class and, therefore, the Democratic Party...
...All can be replaced by supervisors and secretaries with minimal training, just as the wire services and editors can replace the Guild...
...Since Collum's article did nothing to challenge this, I wonder where your illustrator got his idea...
...Larry Erickson Berkley, Massachusetts Nat Hentoff describes a serious new threat to civil liberties...
...In almost any jurisdiction in the United States, it is perfectly legal to fire someone for real or perceived homosexuality...
...they have a vested interest in minimizing costs to maximize bonuses and profits...
...His comparison of censorship in this country to the Ayatollah Khomeini's death threat was mostly off in order of magnitude...
...B.J...
...John Burton Washington, New Jersey Doing the Lord's Work I rather enjoyed Danny Duncan Collum's exercise in hubris ("Doing the Lord's Work," February issue) because it served to point out the problems caused by those who base their political activism on superstition instead of acting from the highest motive: simple love of humanity, without threats of hell or promises of heaven...
...Racism is a symptom of economic pressures, real or imagined, on the most short-sighted and ignorant members of society, be they white males, Third World lesbians, or magazine editors...
...Religion is a matter of personal belief...
...Is The Washington Post "neither pro- nor anti-union" when it busts its most militant union, sends nonunion employees to strikebreaking school, keeps the Guild without a contract for years at a time, drags out grievance procedures, revokes the Guild's dues-checkoff for new members, etc...
...If that doesn't show how wonderful the tolerance of gays and lesbians in the United States is, I don't know what does...
...The remark that "for proof, just watch a sporting event with a randomly selected group of them" is the kind of racist, sexist, ignorant remark that I laugh at and reject on the factory floor...
...I wanted it as a study aid and also to see what we were saying to the Soviet people...
...Official Secrets Act As Nat Hentoff notes in his column (Who's on First?, March issue), the courts that allowed the use of the Espionage Act to convict Samuel Morison for leaking information to the press have, in effect, created an Official Secrets Act, something Congress has steadfastly rejected...
...No progressive cause is served by making women subject to the control of bigoted religious dogmas...
...No union is more than a phantom unless it can stop production, halt the product...
...I studied Russian for four years and wanted to subscribe to Amerika, the Russian-language magazine which the U.S...
...However, I do not see the military's persecution as being any different than the silence from much of the Left about lesbian and gay issues in general...
...In his article, Collum says, "The prophetic minority allies itself with those who are most starkly victimized, suffering, or oppressed...
...Editorial employees have never been able by themselves to stop production...
...All they have to do is harass you and make your life so miserable that you quit...
...Personally, I don't understand why any lesbian or gay man would want to serve in the military, but they certainly have the right to do so...
...Ethan Bloch Kingston, New York The illustration with Danny Duncan Collum's article showed a white man in a Roman collar at the head of a group of people carrying a cross...
...People who are part of and support an evil institution and its evil doctrines aid and abet evil, no matter how noble their intentions...
...The arguments these so-called religious leftists and pseudo-feminists use are the same arguments used by religious fascism...
...Where he ever got the idea that "the military is the only work place in the country where homosexuality is legal grounds for dismissal" is beyond me...
...Charlie Swanson Eugene, Oregon Add my case to your April Editor's Memo...
...Given the Supreme Court's Hardwick decision, the extent of AIDS phobia and hysteria, the resultant rise of gay-bashing and gay-baiting, and the real fear of millions of lesbians and gay men that if they do come out (or are "discovered") they will lose their jobs, their homes, their friends, and their families, I would submit that the military's witch hunt is nothing more than a public manifestation of the rampant and deep-seated homophobia that exists in this country...
...A recent study by the Reagan Justice Department, which was not known for its sympathy to lesbians and gays, found that they were the most likely group in America to experience violence or the threat of violence...
...Only the drivers who deliver papers can shut a newspaper down...
...Among the most oppressed and starkly victimized people in our society are poor women and gays...
...If Bernard Nossiter feels the point should have been that "corporations are neither pro- nor anti-union," I can only respond that by their deeds shall ye know them—and many corporations' deeds are clearly antiunion...
...Certainly, I made the point that the Guild's 1974 strike failed because the Guild didn't ask craft unions to honor the strike...
...That is why several rank-and-filers, including myself, led a revolt that brought the strike to an end...
...From my perspective as a member of the religious Left, the movement has been led predominantly by lay people, with the clergy following somewhat belatedly afterwards...
...John Hanrahan Washington, D.C...
...Bernard D. Nossiter s New York, New York The author replies: I'm not clear what point I supposedly missed...
...15 Columbus, Ohio I think John Hanrahan's piece on The Washington Post and labor misses the point...
...I also made the point that the pressmen's 1975 strike failed because a Guild majority crossed picket lines and continued to work...
...Similarly, most members of the Jewish-identified Left do not break ranks with the rest of the Left on issues of abortion and lesbian and gay rights, contrary to Collum's assertion that these issues are problematic for the "religious Left...
...Robert Sommer New York, New York I am sick and tired of these "religious leftists" who, in effect, serve as stalking horses for the* religious Right, and of self-styled "feminists" whose only visible function is to promote the campaign against abortion rights...
...31:1-20, 32-35), father-daughter incest (Gen...
...So when the Guild's paid administrator led Post editorial employees out in 1974 but told the crafts to keep working, he was bent on a suicide course...
...I suggest that journalists watch carefully for such leaks by those on the side of the Government, and publicize them with enough details so that readers can join in the effort to arouse public opinion...
...I might have found it easier to take Collum's article seriously if he had revised his close to begin, "What leftists, religious and secular, need to reach for these days is a nonreligious [not 'non-sectarian'] moral vision upon which to reconstruct American life...
...It is not surprising that The New York Times covers only Lerner and the big-name intellectuals who write for Tikkun, but it is striking that an article in The Progressive fails to mention the many grass-roots organizations and publications such as New Jewish Agenda, the Shalom Center, International Jewish Peace Union, Genesis II, and others who have been doing important, if not widely recognized, progressive work since before Tikkun appeared...
...Mike Friedman Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...To add to my chagrin, none of the civil-liberties organizations I approached, including the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, would go to court with me...
...Billie Aul Albany, New York Witch Hunt at Parris Island As a gay man and a longtime subscriber to The Progressive, I have often grumbled about your lack of coverage of lesbian and gay issue...
...it is not and never has been competent to speak to any issue of universal morality...
...I must take issue, however, with a significant point made in Jim Lynch's article...
...Have you a better way to demonstrate how utterly revolting many found Stevens's dogmatic support of the Ayatollah...
...Even where it is against the law to fire someone for being lesbian or gay, employers can easily get rid of a lesbian or gay employee...
...Such a feeling of total disgust may be well justified in the case of Stevens...
...Such prosecution therefore becomes a club for selective use against a leaker or a news organization that embarrasses the Government...
...The Guild foolishly resists a Teamster offer to merge, and at The Post, an exceptionally profitable enterprise, even this device will not work: There, the drivers are independent contractors and nonunion...
...The Post's conduct was the equivalent of President Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic Controllers...
...I found that the greatest consequence was a good feeling that I was doing something right...
...The military is just a bit more forthright about where it stands...
...When companies take steps to weaken or eliminate their unions, or to prevent union organizing, I certainly consider such acts antiunion...
...Complaints to civil-rights commissions take time, cost money, can often be hard to prove, and may cause more harm than good to someone who is not fully out of the closet...
...Information Agency circulates in the Soviet Union...
...Louis, Missouri Union-Busting at The Post Special thanks to John Hanrahan for his excellent article, "The Union-Busting Post" (February issue...
...How typically smug to exclude the non-religious from any vision of America...
...After several years of telephone-tax refusal, I began refusing to pay the Federal income tax I owed and giving the resisted tax money to worthy local causes...
...Robert Kaplan Tucson, Arizona Finally, The Progressive is beginning to pay some attention to lesbian and gay issues...
...If Christians had a god that respects life, perhaps they could truly help the victimized, suffering, or oppressed, instead of creating victimization, suffering, and oppression...
...Newspaper Guild strikes succeed only when craft unions respect the picket line...
...In spite of the risks, I have come to believe that there is some level of resistance that each of us can undertake...
...The fact is that the religious Center and Left are predominantly pro-choice, as is evident from most opinion polls and from the public stands taken by Center-to-Left Christian and Jewish religious bodies...
...Left-wing Christians should spend their time cleaning up the stinking offal that is the residue of 2,000 years of their pernicious philosophy...
...Is Frank Perdue "neither pro- nor anti-union" when he contacts an organized-crime figure in an effort to keep unions out of his plants...
...Do you think any of our plethora of loud-mouth reactionaries will screech in protest against this blatant case of "judge-made law," as they do whenever a decision is handed down in favor of civil rights or civil liberties...
...Larry Bassett Greenfield, Massachusetts Our Own Ayatollahs Erwin Knoll's "Our Own Ayatollahs" (Editor's Memo, April issue) was incredible...
...War-tax resistance challenges the belief that "there is nothing I can do...
...And the clerical leaders in the civil-rights movement were mostly black...
...Thus, I was excited to see Jim Lynch's article on the treatment of lesbians and gay men in the military ("Witch Hunt at Parris Island," March issue) and even more excited over the quality of the article itself...
...Storming a library or record store to destroy someone else's copy is, of course, a despicable act of censorship that must be condemned...
...Today, thanks to cold-type composition, not even the craft unions can halt the productive process...
...When religion has made pronouncements on morality—especially sexuality—it has inevitably chosen the immoral option: that which hurts the most people...
...Nossiter says corporations "have a vested interest in minimizing costs to maximize bonuses and profits," and so "prefer weak to strong unions...
...Poor women and gays are oppressed because of Christian doctrine...
...The Guild's failure the next year to support the pressmen, who waged a mad campaign of sabotage, sealed the isolation and helplessness of The Post's editorial workers...
...I would have expected the editor of The Progressive to have a clearer view of free speech and the threats to it...
...I was living my values as best I was able...
Vol. 53 • May 1989 • No. 5
