World of Opinion
On war with Iraq: War is too important to become the political guessing game it has become under the current administration.
Playing coy with the media about some things may be all right, but it is never OK to take lightly the subject of war.
It would help all American citizens, and the world, if President Bush would set his vice president straight, or the vice president would set the president straight, about how far down the track is the decision to attack Iraq. …
Inconvenient and anti-intuitive as some in the administration may think it is, Bush needs not just an international coalition to go against Iraq, he needs the agreement of the American people, too.
At the moment he does not seem to have the first. With it or without it, he better get busy working on the second if he truly intends to take us to war.
If that is not his intention, then he should send Cheney back to his bunker.
On banning smoking in public:
The Ohio Supreme Court is once again on the wrong side of history with its ridiculous decision striking down Lucas County’s ban on smoking in public places.
Public opinion across the state of Ohio and indeed the nation comes down overwhelmingly against smoking in confined public places, and the day will come when Ohio officials accept the inevitable.
But waiting for the General Assembly to give county boards of health the power the Supreme Court contends they lack, or to go the extra mile and enact a statewide ban on its own, is virtually a hopeless exercise. The Republican-controlled legislature is not about to take on the tobacco industry, and the Democrats and their buddies in organized labor have little stomach for such a fight either.
Accordingly, it’s time for the citizens of Ohio to bypass the Chamber of the Inert in Columbus and begin a concentrated push for a constitutional amendment to get it done.
… A constitutional amendment would finally validate the notion that a smoker’s rights stop where a nonsmoker’s nose begins.
On women at the club:
Maybe William “Hootie” Johnson is doomed to failure in his gutsy stand against the holier-than-thou bullies insistent on making a supposedly pluralistic America conform to their politically correct, straitjacket vision of how private individuals and institutions should conduct themselves, but here is a nod of the head to the man.
The demand of Martha Burk, chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, was that the Augusta National Golf Club admit a woman as a member, and the reply of Johnson, its president, was that the club does not extend invitations to members at the “point of a bayonet.”
It seems like just about everyone is piling on Johnson and making a hero out of Burk, who accuses the home of the Masters Tournament of “bigotry.” But he is a man with a terrific record on minority issues and is simply making it known that his organization is not in need of Burk’s moral instruction. Women enter the club. Women play at the club. Someday, the club will probably break with tradition and invite women as members.
But if it doesn’t do so soon, so what? Does anyone genuinely believe suffering would then have increased in the land? Does anyone really think that the quest for gender equality had been handed a setback? And does anyone honestly think that Johnson’s stance shows he harbors ugly feelings about female inferiority or that his stance contributes to such feelings? Surely no one is so stupid.
There is something important at stake in all of this, however: When the ideological enforcers like Burk start applying the pressure, often finding means to punish people and groups economically for their divergence from the only true way, too many of the victims do not fight back. Instead, they quickly salute, figuring that independence of thought and behavior is not worth the candle. Might it be different this time? We can only hope.
On woman’s death sentence:
Nigeria should intervene, by force if necessary, to stop an “Islamic court” from proceeding with a travesty of a trial that could result in stoning a woman to death. An Islamic court in the town of Fantua found Amina Lawal, 30, guilty of having sex out of wedlock.
The penalty for that offense is to be half-buried in the ground, then stoned to death. All the proof the court needed was that Lawal had a child more than nine months after her divorce. In what the court deemed an act of generosity and mercy, it has delayed the execution until Lawal’s baby is weaned.
Lawal is the second Nigerian woman condemned by a religious court to death by stoning. The first won her appeal. But Shariah courts – Islamic religious courts that hand down verdicts in Nigeria and other Muslim-dominated countries – seem likely to see how far they can go with their medieval sentences: stonings, beheadings and amputations.
Islam has no central religious authority to rule on matters of doctrine. But it would help if the more enlightened Islamic clerics spoke out more forcefully and vigorously to coax their more primitive brethren into the 21st century. What their courts practice is neither religion nor law. It is barbarism.