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Show Sunday, June 6, 1993 The Daily Heraid . m m m m m m ps. i 18a seems increasingly rare, hut sonic good news came out of a federal court recently. A federal appeals court ruled that the Boy Scouts ot America, whose members acknowledge a duty to God. That argument didn't wash with the do not have to admit people who do not U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Cirbelieve in God. cuit. Congress, the ruling said. pro The fact that the case ever went to a clear definition of the term "pubcourt in the first place is ridiculous. lic accommodation" as well as a long But we lie in an age when people list of examples hotels, restaurants, and resort to legal action over every minor theaters, stadiums, gas stations Boy Scouts are "as different from the grievance. The case arose when the Boy Scouts facilities listed in Title II as dogs are Mark from cats." refused to admit Welsh of Hinsdale, iil.. after he rePrivate clubs have been set up in this fused to take the Scout oath, which for the sole purpose of evading includes a pledge to "do my duty to country civil rights laws. The Scouts, howevGiid." The young man said he didn't er, have a long history of promoting beliee in a Supreme Beimi. faith and conduct. One memThe boy's lather. Elliot Welsh -- religious e the of ber panel dissented whom we suspect played a key role in said that, although he he but even formulating Mark's "opinions" is a the Civil Rights Act does approfessed agnostic. The senior Welsh thought Scouts have a constitutional the filed a lawsuit arguing that the Scouts' ply, association. free of action constituted discrimination on right The ruling is particularly welcome the basis of religion by a place of pubin Utah and throughout the LDS Tinews lic accommodation, in violation of Mormon Scout troops make Church. 1! tle of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. a since the Welsh's argument held that large chunk of the total Scout up 5 million organization. While it is entirely possiBoy Scout organization has ble that a given troop might admit a on eligimembers, has few restrictions bility and operates largely out of professed atheist, they should certainly homes open to any member, it has no not be forced to do so. It's nice that right and reason premore right to exclude atheists than resin the courts on this occasion. vailed taurants have to refuse o serve blacks. It Harold Comment id-e- d three-judg- 0 Give something back Disaster averted Editor: From a wise bishop I have been giv en the opportunity in my LDS ward to be the activity coordinator for 64 senior adults over the age of 62. He asked me to meet their k activities which I have needs with done for the past six months. I want to express several things that have arned from this experience. Our senior adults are our leaders of y e verday They are our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, lawyers, businessmen etc. They are still fun, knowledgeable, appreciative, honest, full of wisdom, w itty but they are also lonely, depressed, in ill health, bored and need to be recognized as of worth. 2. The majority of these senior adults still work or have retired and have a second job. I hav e found that the group I have a good who are home every the ones wiih arc time the anil only thing they have to look day ft irwai u io is church on Sunday . Thi- - program gives them something to ' !. forward to. It gives them interaction a it!i each other. I see where they are more caring of each other as their friendships grow. I'd like to thank those who have made it possible for us in this community to have the Senior Friendship Center in our midst. I plan carpools for those w ho need it. I call in by p.m. the day before to let them know how man will be coming to dinner. They reserve a table for our ward. The meal is brought from the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. This same meal is delivered to the homebound through the "Meals on Wheels" program. The sad part to me is that this huge hall is two thirds empty! encourage other areas of Orem to care about their older senior adults. Give them a life. Get them out of their homes once a week for an hour or two. Let them associate w ith each other. Call and arrange to pick them up and return them if necessary. The city has prov ided this wonderful facility. Let's help our seniors use it. The center has a full program of ceramics, inexpensive healthcare, bingo, exercising, pool, balanced dinner, dancing every Saturday night and grow ing friendships. I am 49 y ears old. It takes younger adults life back to our older seniors. They H ;ive it deserve My own life has been richly blessed because of my sen ice. Margaret Wilde Orem Editor: We wish to thank the two young men in a new white sports car (we didn't get to thank them or get their names) who stopped their car and tried to help at the Utah State Park incident on May 27. My husband and I had taken our two cars to the Provo Boat Harbor to reserve a space for our motor home to spend Memorial Day weekend. After finding a space to reserve, I parked my car. My husband left in his ear to go to the gate and pay the ranger. Shortly after, as I was standing on the beach talking to some people from Salt Lake City , a high wind came up and my car started to roll down the embankment toward the lake. In a panic, I tried to stop the car and so did the gentleman from Salt Lake. We were unable to do so as the car was moving much too fast! The two young men jumped out of their car and asked if anyone was in my car. When I replied "no," they drove to the raneer station to report the ear coins; in the lake. Thank goodness no one was in the car as it sank very fast! It filled with water so rapidly that it was under water by the time my husband and the ranger arrived. It's very chilling to think we even tried to stop the car. Had someone been in the car, the incident could have been a real disaster. Again, thanks to the young men whose timing and efforts may have prevented someone drowning. Thanks to Ranger Miller for his attitude of concern, and also try ing to give the situation a bit of humor. As we were concerned about die car and its contents (boxes of gum). The ranger asked me if I had a fishing license and permission to fish with bubble gum as bait. Thanks to all the nice people who helped in any way. as this was a holiday weekend and people had their own plans. It was most appreciated This incident was a great reminder how precious life is and to us Memorial Day was more solemn and meaningful. Barn and Clorhi Carlson Spanish Fork mid-wee- 1 . 1 Don't teach sex Ftiitor: How in the world can the stale think they can just decide to teach some perverted way of having sex to our children? Schools are supposed to be teaching our children how to read, write and do arithmetic. Teachers are not hired to teach my children how to have sex or anything sex and with whom to h,-abut sex. Sex is started with a "S" not an "R." Sex is not one of the basic courses that schools should bo teaching my children. Since when did sex education become a basic course? II schools have oo much money then used to teach my please refund that portion homosexuals in the children about sex. Keep the closets where they belong. Schools better not dare spend my money teaching my children about homosexuality, period. When the day comes they begin to do so. my I w ill child is going to be taught at home and school state new a for camp.'mmmL' bcem hoard. DwiphiJ. Ilirrca Orem Another cut Editor: In the last two weeks the country has been on the S2(K) Hollywood haircut for Bill Clinton and the $275 New York coiffeur for his wife. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Clinton household can't spring $20 to do something about daughter Chelsea's scary fright wig ofa hair do? Lu Ann Brobst Spanish Fork foe-use- Letters policy The Daily Herald welcome letters to the editor. Address letter to Letters to the Hditor, I)Bo 717. 1'nnv. VTS4d03. Letters must be signed and include the writer's full and a da) lime plume numname, address ber for verification. Letters should be nvJ. double spaced, and less than 4(H) u i nds in length. The most common reasons for not publishing letter are: fiH A 'tie. unsigned, illegible. ohsccihur libelous. Sometimes letters whu'n are too long for the lettet u the ediu a Junin are chosen f appear as guest opinii w pieces. Those hvig submissions nor ciomvi for guest opinion pieces w ill not he published as letters w ithout heme slu 'ttened t t to '60s Jeers for Clinton mild trudge around writing parking tickets, how a group of passing protesters had hurled the epithet at her. "And I hadn't even The booing of President Clinton when he showed up for a Memorial Day ceremony at the Vietnam War Wall has upset many commentators. They say that the hostile Vietnam veterans demonstrated poor judgment and a lack of respect for the man who is now president of this country. Or if not for the man. for the office he holds. After so many y ears have passed, they say. it would be better to let bygones be by gones and forget that Clinton did everything he legally could to dodge the draft. And they remind us that Clinton w as not any different than countless other young men who resisted military service out of conscience or because they wanted to preserve their hides. I can't argue with that position. I've never heard any similar booing for former professional sports stars who were pushed to the head of the long enlistment line to reserve units. sign up for That was the standard dodge of franchise ow ners, w ho wanted to keep their valuable physical specimens out of harm's way. Nor did they boo the many highly placed ig given them a ticket," she said. college dean Many a showed up at his office to Find that it had been seized by protesters and that he had suddenly been transformed from a softhearted liberal into a bloodthirsty, colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, fascist pig. Or maybe a tool of the CIA. And there was the barber on Clark Street in Chicago, who looked at his shattered window after rampaging demonstrators caved it in. "What did my window do to cause this war?" he asked. Sometimes all it took was a short haircut, a suit, a shirt and a tie to be suspected of having imperialistic, fascistic, mild-manner- fJikc Ooyko Syndicated Columnist mentators who have scolded those unforgiving veterans who booed Clinton. Some were members or supporters of the anti-wmovement, and there is nothwith that. ing wrong But let me jog their memories. When it came to booing, jeering, insulting and verbal abuse', there haven't been many groups that could compete with the crowd. By the standards of those days, the booing of Clinton would be considered little more than a mild rebuke. As far as I know, none of the Vietnam which vets were shouting the old vocabuwas a standard part of the anti-wlary. There must have been nights when President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and other Democrats heard it in their sleep. When the war protests exploded at the 1968 Democratic Convention, a popular chant was: "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" But it wasn't long before it evolved, for purposes of emphasis, into: "F you. LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Although Johnson wasn't our First war president, he was probably the First to be accused of making the killing of children and other innocents his main priority. You didn't have to be a president, a politician or even a supporter of the war to become an object of scorn. Any cop, regardless of his political view s, was a "f ar stay-at-ho- anti-w- members of the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations who combined draft dodging with being military hawks. At least Clinton was on record as being against the war. These "war wimps," as someone dubbed them, thought our Vietnam involvement was a terrific idea. They just preferred that someone else do the fighting and dying. Just about every senator and other influ- ar ar ential politician from that era who had a draft-ag- e son used clout to make sure the was offspring protected by getting him into a reserve unit, keeping him in college, or finding a deferred job, such as teaching in an inner-cit- y school. It was remarkable how many well-bor- n young men suddenly felt a calling to teach the three R's to little black children. And how quickly their career goals shifted to selling stocks and bonds once the w ar ended. So when it comes to the Vietnam War, there is more than enough hypocrisy to spread around. And that applies to some of the com- - pig." ' remember being told by a beluddlcd meter maid, a woman whose job was to I tendencies. capitalistic, For example, I once went to a protest newspaper office the kind of publication to ask a that always spelled it Amerika few innocuous questions about some planned marches. Suddenly, the young editor was leaping about yelling to his staff: "Don't talk to him. He's part of the capitalist, baby-killin- d) imperialist press." I tried to explain that the paper I was working on wasn't a very successful capitalist enterprise since it was losing money by the buckets, and that I, too, was against the war. He could not be persuaded, so I retreated with the accusation of being a imperialist ringing in my ears. Oddly enough, after the war ended, that hysterical young man went to work for the same capitalist newspaper and is now a journalism professor at Northwest- ern University. Which shows how the passage of time can change people. He has gone from a young goofball to a middle-age- d goofball. So, yes, it might have been poor form for those veterans to boo President Clinton, and we probably should put the Vietnam era behind us. But as some of Clinton's image advisers might have told him about the booing: That's showbiz. Gore, Babbitt preach environmental gospel - Vice President Al WASHINGTON Gore and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt are booked for breakfast every Thursday for the rest of the Clinton administration. That's when they meet in Gore's White House office for environmental bible study though their focus is on saving the planet's species, not souls. Biodiversity, ancient forests and "nitrogen-fixatiocyn cles" are on the menu for the administration's high priests of conservation, who sometimes commune more as ecologists than as politicians. By earmarking this time for the environment, both men are fulfilling a goal they set at the outset: Don't allow the environmental agenda to be crowded out by the crush of everyday crisis management. "I think Gore has gone through the inevitable transition of becoming vice president." Babbitt told us during a recent interview. "All of a sudden he's in the midst of Bosnia, most favored nation, arms control. ... He has played a full role. Very early on we talked about his transformation and how it was we were going to make all this stuff work ... we settled into a Thursday morning al meeting at the While House." At one recent breakfast. Gore and bin. joined by a handful of top officials that included' EPA Administrator Carol Browner, talked about the need for cutting government bureaucracy and red tape for the sake of salmon preservation. Babbitt noted that a salmon travels through 23 different regulatory jurisdictions during its lack Anderson Syndicated Columnist natural cycle trom birth, to the time it, niukes it i A of the high mountains of the West, to its trek down the rivers a thousand miles into the Pacific, and then back to spawn where it was born. "The reason I raise this issue is that the purpose of these meetings is not to get into a lot of detail about w hat we're going to do next week," Babbitt says. "K's to see if we can't all kind of get up from the paper from our desk. ... The salmon becomes almost a metaphor for w hat this is. to think about how we are going to cross 23 jurisdictional lines, and get a coherent policy to prevent the extinction of salmon." During the 12 years of the Reagan-Bus- h administrations, "cutting red tape" were often code words for permissiveness toward corporate polluters, not for saving a salmon species. A weekly White House breakfast devoted to the environment would have beep deemed heretical under Ronald Reagan or George Bush, who dubbed Gore the "ozone man" during the environg campaign to mock his mental treatise. "Earth in the Balance." During the hush administration, the nonchalance of Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan was embodied in a remark about red squirrels. Protection of the squirrels was blocking the construction of a federal best-sellin- project in Arizona, and Lujan was getting frustrated. "Nobody's told me the difference between a red squirrel, a black one or a brown one. Do we have to save every subspecies?" Lujan asked. Babbitt and James Watt, Ronald Reagan's first Interior secretary, are intriguing bookends for the last dozen years. The distances between the two, the standard-bearer- s of their respective administrations, are as vast as the Grand Canyon itself. Even the normally Babbitt grows animated recalling the Watt story that's seared into his memory. "The one I remember most is when he (Watt) came out to the Grand Canyon and spent a day on the river, and announced that he was tired and wished there was a helicopter to take him out because it was too long and too boring," recalls Babbitt, who was then governor of Arizona. The Grand Canyon is Babbitt's favorite place on earth. He can deliver college lectures on its geologic history, and he was raised not far away. Watt's comment disgusted Babbitt in the way an Italian might be disgusted by a visitor to the Sistine Chapel who asks. "Who put those smears on the wall?" Babbitt and Watt do share one thing in common. Both read a mandate into their readings of the Bible. For Watt, it w as the Second Coming, which he envoked in 1981 to dow nplay the need for conservation: "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord mild-manner- returns." |
