Correspondence

...According to the U.S...

...Women are to be worshiped only and not held responsible for activities in which oppressive white guys and religious nuts are no doubt truly to blame...

...I’ll take Babbitt over Robertson and Falwell any day...

...In a culture in which getting and spending represents the highest good, natural resources become yet another commodity to be used and disposed of in an atmosphere of consumptive hedonism...

...Talking the talk may be an improvement over the conspiracy of silence that once cloaked quotas, but congressional Republicans have yet to show that they can walk the walk...

...Sorry, that won’t feed the bulldog...

...To win is not always to do right, as many a current White House staffer can attest...

...Stephen K. Medvic West Lafayette, IN While reading Tucker Carlson’s excellent piece and speculating about a possible floor fight in San Diego and the likely results of a prochoice victory in that fight, I was reminded of the old nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty...

...How can Bob Dole support a plank in the platform showing tolerance to pro-choice Republicans...

...One might think that those within mainline Protestant churches would be cautious of their bedfellows, but then again, if one has already walked away from transcendent authority and chosen experience as the final arbiter of moral truth, then the path from the scriptures and traditions of the church “to the ‘priests of the snake clan’” is but a short, intimately personal journey...

...Commerce Department’s County and City Data Book, this hamlet is located in Windsor County, where whites compose 99.27 percent of the population...

...Might there not be a better way to do battle against the radical fringe at Yale...

...Negative publicity affects not only the large donors of the day, some of whom have already written Yale out of their wills, but also those who plan to give (or not) in future years...

...Pro-choice Republicans could argue that while they don’t think a fetus has reached full status as a person, neither do they think it is “merely a piece of tissue...

...It’s not at all surprising that Nelson and other conservatives today resort to a process of commoditizing nature, insisting for instance that saving endangered species has no intrinsic value because it has no dollar value...

...Or maybe there just isn’t much difference...

...No one was ever debased or diminished by the saving of an old-growth forest, but we are all diminished by a society in which materialistic values become confounded with Christian values...

...The Democrats don’t think setasides are less “defensible...

...Although Yale claims that alumni giving has not suffered from the negative publicity of the Bass fiasco, the reality is likely otherwise...

...Correspondence Anti-Abortion and Pro-Choice...

...Republican softening on abortion is, in short, a betrayal of principles of equality...

...By calling on Yale to release the Cabranes report, however, Rao may unwittingly help turn a mess into a disaster...

...With an enthusiastic turnout of 98 percent of the total eligible voters estimated by the OAS’s verification commission, the registration appears to have been a resounding success...

...Warren Wetmore Hazel Crest, IL Save Yale From Within In throwing light on Yale University’s decision to return Lee Bass’s $20 million gift last year, Neomi Rao rightly puts the blame where it belongs: on Yale’s radical professors and on the administration that capitulated to their demands (“Stonewalling at Yale,” June 24...

...Whatever the potential political gains, it’s un-Republican...

...Apparently, Wicker likes to study his subject from a distance...

...Carlson rightly exposes their position as intellectually vacant, but is keenly aware that a political candidate often prevails even in the absence of morality or religious principle...

...In this they are right for the wrong reason: No discrimination based on the irrelevant, inborn characteristics of race and sex is morally less, or more, defensible...

...Perhaps it is because they either don’t have the courage of their convictions or don’t really believe abortion is murder...

...Kagan and I clearly have opposing views about the role of international monitors...

...Andrew Rusk Galveston, IN Pipeline to the Almighty Thank you for publishing Robert H. Nelson’s article “Bruce Babbitt, Pipeline to the Almighty” (June 24...

...At the same time, it falls short of murder because the fetus is not yet a person...

...While a switch to the pro-choice position might seem a wise tactic in a country where (arguably) three out of five voters and four out of five wealthy donors are pro-choice, this move would be like Humpty’s great fall and the resulting shell fragments would be all that remained of the bond that once held Pat Robertson and Christie Whitman in the same party...

...I say, go for the whole ball of wax, and let the Democrat filibusterers know that their actions will come back to haunt them the next time they run for office...

...Eric Spake Traer, IA Robert H. Nelson sneers at what he considers the quasi-religious appeals of Bruce Babbitt in defense of sound environmental policy...

...Marc D. Smith Portsmouth, NH Affirmative Inaction I am appalled to see Republican leaders failing the first serious gut check on shutting down affirmative discrimination (“Affirmative Action: A New Idea,” June 24...

...Igor Kirman New York, NY Wicker’s White Hometown How interesting that Tom Wicker chose to write his Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America in Rochester, Vt., at what David Frum calls his “writer’s lodge” (“Wicker’s Tragic Failing,” June 24...

...Terry Eastland’s “new idea” would settle for attempting to end contract set-asides—a “half loaf ” for now...

...Jennifer McCoy The Carter Center Atlanta, GA...

...And selfish support for abortion is nothing but the denial of duties once accepted and understood...

...Our delegation witnessed a process designed to ease the registration of the poorest and most isolated segments of Nicaraguan society...

...Because the loss of such future donations is hard to measure now, it is unlikely to influence, much less dictate, Yale’s direction and decisions...

...As a pro-choice Democrat, let me offer a solution...

...Let us not, as Democrats of yore, begin our own list of whimpering groups to whom standards of equality and responsibility don’t apply...

...To win with principle, however, Republicans must resist abortion and its beckoning sirens of self...

...Babbitt’s sense that there is something transcendent in our experience of nature seems altogether wholesome when one considers the tawdry, pandering, accusatory Christianity of Pat Robertson...

...Although the pope identifies materialism as the besetting sin and chief corruption of American society, it falls on deaf ears among conservatives who have an abiding faith in the mystical powers of a marketplace freed from any moral purview or reasonable constraint...

...At the Carter Center, we believe that international monitors must keep their distance from the parties, while consistently demonstrating their interest in the democratic process...

...Would he be as accepting of those who favored legalizing infanticide...

...Time and our patience are fast running out...

...As a recent graduate of a mainline Protestant seminary, I know well of the movement of many within my denomination towards such figures as Lester Brown, Lynn White, and Carl Sagan...

...The king’s horses and the king’s men—represented by Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, William Weld, and Ralph Reed—are most unlikely to be able to put our beloved Humpty together again...

...The liberal strains of many denominations, joined together in their rejection of a transcendent moral authority, are surprised to find themselves dealing with feelings of irrelevancy...

...Eastland is naive to think that a bill ending only contract set-asides would not be filibustered in the Senate just as energetically as a bill to end all preferences...

...If we are to believe prochoicers, responsible living is an undue burden not to be visited upon womankind...

...It is apparent from his article that he, and many of those he cites, supports a particular political party in Nicaragua...

...Was this a flawed election process deliberately designed to disenfranchise Sandinista opponents...

...Its potential life places it somewhere between those two points and, consequently, somewhere between a legally recognized being and moral significance...

...Tucker Carlson claims that prochoice Republicans are in a “philosophical bind” and that, worse, “it shows” (“What Pro-Choice Republicans Believe,” June 24...

...Kevin R. O’Keefe Campbell, CA Tucker Carlson did my heart good and the GOP proud in his excellent piece on the indefensible positions of pro-choice Republicans...

...Perhaps he will soon favor us with a book about rain forests written from a lodge in Arizona...

...Joseph Johnson Gettysburg, PA Democracy in Nicaragua Robert Kagan wrote that only Republicans care about the peasants of Nicaragua, and that the Carter Center “spiritedly defends a flawed electoral process that seems consciously designed to disenfranchise many of Nicaragua’s poorest citizens” (“Republicans and Campesinos,” June 17...

...When worldwide change left Marxist-dominated “liberation theology” by the wayside, many in the church were ripe for the olive-branch offered by the environmental community...

...Now, perhaps Carlson can explain how anti-choice Republicans talk of abortion as murder but act as though it is not...

...Thus, the termination of a pregnancy is seen as “an agonizing personal decision” because one would be halting the development of the fetus, a future human being...

...Instead, continued negative publicity will deliver a lasting, if deferred, blow to Yale’s reputation and endowment...

...And the bulldog is famished...

...Since Richard Nixon’s administration, Republicans have been complicit in quotas...

...I also just returned from observing the voter-registration process in the Nicaraguan mountains, and I can attest to the fact that there are plenty of people, including many non-Republicans, who do “give a fig” about the campesinos...

...For whatever reason, none of the Republicans he interviewed could explain why they find abortion repugnant and, at the same time, oppose restrictions on it...

...Depend upon it—if they fail, the restive majority will elect a Congress that will make Pat Buchanan’s peasants with pitchforks seem as demure as a DAR cotillion...

...What then, I ask, would stand in the way of American socialism...

...We must illumine the difference between Republicans and the Party of Preferences on the issue of quotas...

...Why don’t antichoice Republicans demand the death penalty for abortionists and women who choose abortions...

...Self is, after all, to paraphrase a prominent Republican, what it’s all about...