Letters to the editor

Scholarships incorrectly reported

I fail to see both the relevance and purpose of the information in the Feb. 7 article "Athletics reallocates scholarships" in today’s JMU news community. While it is true that the athletic department did indeed reallocate scholarship money for ten sports in 2001, this change occurred nearly four years ago and is no longer worthy of front-page news.

The article’s shallow coverage of this controversial topic only managed to insult the "participatory" sports and create disagreement in the athletic department. If The Breeze would like to offer future information on the scholarship reallocations of 2001, they would serve the reader better to report on the ways that these changes have impacted the various sports programs.

Rebecca Vanderelst
senior, CSD
JMU women’s tennis player

Lawmakers right to vote down bill

Our national constitution, which supercedes all others — including JMU’s, explicitly states that the peoples’ "right to bear arms shall not be infringed." We do not need people telling us that our rights make them uncomfortable and that we should suspend them. The House committee was correct in ignoring this unlawful attempt to retract a right given to us in a document authored by the university’s namesake — which makes this attempt all the more ironic.

To any who would pass a similar bill, I say keep your laws off our guns, our bodies, and our gods. Your campus-oriented world view may be well received in the SGA but, in the real world, it’s as reasonable as a soup sandwich.

Michael Santos
sophomore, history

Time for public to move past abortion

In response to Ken Ong’s letter, "Abortion amoral, new Holocaust," in the Feb. 14 edition, I think it is time to get over these controversial issues because we will never find an appropriate answer. Abortions are legal in the United States, giving every woman the freedom to choose her child’s destiny. Freedom of choice is something universal in the American society, granting everybody the right to pursue his or her own dream. In contrast, freedom of life is a subjective moral position toward certain things. Attitudes differ based on individual preferences that result from a religious or non-religious affiliation.

In contrast to Ong’s opinion, abortion is a women’s issue because they have to live with the consequences no matter what decision they make, and I doubt these decisions are made five minutes before dinner. Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court clearly gave that right to every woman, no matter what various religious groups think.

Comparing this situation to slavery and the Holocaust is absolutely not appropriate. I didn’t hear and see the majority of Christians standing up for the African American part of society, even though they were all Americans as well. I didn’t hear or see the Christians either when the Holocaust happened, which may have forced the United States to intervene earlier in Europe.

If you are a true Christian, you are not even considering an abortion as an option, so stop judging and trying to convince individuals outside your beliefs, because everybody has their own moral standard.

Christian Hopp
freshman, CIS

Need for abortions must be reduced

Taking a stance on abortion does not have to mean fighting for one extreme or the other. Rather, why not find ways of decreasing the need for an abortion. I am pro-choice, but I would not use that choice unless it was rape and I had no other option. Abortions are used as a last resort when the woman feels she has no other option available. It is not a decision that women take lightly — it is a decision they have to live with for the rest of their lives. Whether you’re pro-choice or anti-abortion, no one is in favor of the abortion procedure. We need to act to find ways to reduce the need for abortions — such as promoting better education, increasing available contraceptives and the availability of the emergency contraceptive pill, which prohibits fertilization and harms nothing if it has already occurred, and men need to stop ignoring their responsibility in the prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

Abortions will continue to happen, but they need to happen legally and safely. Deaths from abortion declined drastically after legalization. To state that only 1 percent of abortions are due to rape is misleading. Rapes are under-reported, thus statistical information of such cases are hard to come by.

Tiffany Brooks
junior, Dance

Holocaust reference inappropriate

In Ken Ong’s letter, "Abortion amoral, new Holocaust," he makes an inaccurate, tasteless and highly offensive comparison of abortion to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic collection, enslavement, torture, murder and attempted genocide of Jews and a number of other peoples because of their religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. On the other hand, abortion is the legalized destruction of embryonic cells. Abortion differs greatly from the fully aware suffering of already born people doomed to their deaths in concentration camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz and to make that comparison is simply incorrect. Ong’s comparison belittles the suffering of those sentenced to die and trivializes the horror and sadism of the Holocaust. There is a great difference between the premise of the Holocaust and abortion. There is no genocide component to abortion. Hitler used racial grounds to exterminate Jews and other people — no one is set out to destroy all embryos. To make such a comparison is an insult to the memory of the living and conscious human beings murdered by the Nazis. Ong is fully entitled to his opinion regarding abortion, but his comparison to the Holocaust is both highly inaccurate and inappropriate — despite its emotional appeal.

Jacob Forstater
sophomore, physics
Publicity Director,
Hillel at JMU