Abortion must be safe, legal, rare

Some comments fomented by the recent Supreme Court decision in Gonzales vs. Carhart, the partial birth abortion case: This case was a stalking horse for conservatives, as partial birth abortion is rare and doesn’t concern a viable fetus. However, the issue carries emotional baggage, which enables the political right.

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion may be revisited through the lens of the 1908 Supreme Court ruling in Muller vs. Oregon relating the establishment of labor laws to a priori assumption of mandated gender functions: "Protect women from making a choice counter to their maternal nature." This not only turns back history, but replaces the contemporary argument from the perspective of fetal well-being. Whatever.

To quote Professor Christine Stansell: "Kennedy’s opinion undermines Constitutional protections for a woman’s right to make decisions established in Roe vs. Wade and ... it summons up assumptions about women that go back to discredited paternalistic decisions of the Supreme Court."

The self-righteous mythology is that if abortion were legally banned the practice would end and society would return to a former state of grace. Abortion has been a historical reality and will continue to be, whatever the case. If banned, the more-affluent classes would go to Canada or Mexico for services readily available (or consult physicians privately); the poor would resort to dangerous pre-Roe practices.

Abortion must be safe, legal and rare. Adoption must be available and affordable, with comprehensive education as the centerpiece of a realistic society. Conclusive research has shown that abstinence indoctrination is moralistic self-delusion at best. An ever-increasing informed majority must work to protect the legal rights of women, which ultimately translates into the health and well-being of a caring society.

Robert T. Russell
Delhi

Doug Dorer, assistant professor of biology at Hartwick College, in a recent letter avoids the marrow of the problem for evolutionists _ the addition of massive amounts of genetic information essential to particles-to-person evolution. More, how do particles (or chemical pools, cosmic-egg explosions) arise from nothing? Without a self-reproducing entity, it’s little more than smoke-blowing for evolutionists _ even to talk about natural selection (which per se is not evolution). If the process cannot begin, how can it continue?

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That there are "many genetic changes"_ reshuffling, duplication, mutations _ is inarguable. ’Tis equally inarguable that they have produced no new genetic information. Providential development and variation within the God-created kinds result only in a sorting or loss of information. Evolution’s dinosaur-to-bird transformation would require enormous amounts of new genetic information (if such were true, but it isn’t; God created land reptiles the day after he created fowl _ Genesis 1:21-25).

It takes a Kantian leap of faith (into the dark) to believe that life emerged from nonlife. That pagan faith is nonetheless part of the professor’s inescapably religious worldview.

My common ancestors, contrary to Professor Dorer’s vacant comment, are Adam and Eve, whom, in Jesus’ words (Matthew 19:4-8), God made "at the beginning ... male and female," doing so not millions of years ago, but only a few thousand years ago. Am I to assume that the professor’s forefather is a hominid? If so, which one?

Origins evolution is a monstrous lie justified by sophisms hawked by Bible-hating materialists. That lie will prove no refuge from the Creator God on Judgment Day.

The Rev. Mitch Wright
Stamford
Wright is pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church in Oneonta.

I attended an Answers in Genesis conference featuring founder Ken Ham. It was non-stop ignorance and stupidity dressed up as pseudo-science _ a mythological cartoon version of reality, a journey back to the Dark Ages.

Genesis has two completely different and contradictory creation stories. This fact is overlooked by fundamentalists, which is not surprising. They also ignore the fact that the Bible contains two completely different sets of so-called Ten Commandments.

But, hey! Who needs facts when one has faith?

Let’s say, by faith, I believe the Great Pumpkin is the one true god. Neither Ken Ham nor J.P. Pasquale can disprove my belief in the GP. As a matter of course, I might suggest that their unbelief is evidence that they are men of little faith _ atheists, even.

I believe so fervently that I intend to found Answers in Peanuts and build the Great Pumpkin Creation Museum. Snoopy playing with dinosaurs will be a popular exhibit. Raising $30 million is no problem. A sucker (aka believer) is born every minute.

Neil Nissenbaum
Jacksonville, N.C.

As reported in your newspaper on May 21, Otsego County will have to pay $99 a ton for its shortfall of solid waste to MOSA for this year. All this because the MOSA contract with Otsego County says that the county must pay the authority if it produces less than some targeted amount of solid waste.

This is surely insane. Otsego County and its taxpayers should be rewarded, not punished for producing less solid waste. The MOSA agreement was a mistake by the old county board.

The current board might redeem its recent tax blunders (raising taxes without knowing it, promising and then threatening to refuse to give taxpayers a refund) by declaring its intention to get out of MOSA when the current contract expires in a few years. Otsego County should in the meantime commit itself to sustainable practices, including the elimination of solid waste altogether. There should be no such thing as garbage, only various kinds of useful stuff.

Adrian Kuzminski
Fly Creek