The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 88, No. 217, Ed. 1 Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Page: 4 of 10
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OPINION
4
Tuesday, August 5,2008
THE BAYTOWN SUN
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Texas Views
Fair
taxation
Birth control: The new pollutant
Congress on vacation
David Bloom
Managing Editor
Luke Hales
City Editor
M.A. Bengtson
Community member
WRITE TO US
The Sun welcomes letters
of up to 300 words and
guest columns of up to 500
words. Guest columns
should include a photo of the
writer.
because its introduction came 40 years ago, at
a time when American culture was enamored
with Woodstock, feminism and free love, pre-
scient warnings and cautions — most notably
Contact Kathryn Lopez, editor of National
Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), at
klopez@nationalreview.com.
ability of women to engage and lead their
communities, and their ability to exercise their
NOWTHINK x
0FKTTERW
ANDgREATHE
. DEEPLY y
Calvin Cormier
Baytown
Josh Grosser
Dayton
FRED HARTMAN
Publisher Emeritus
1950-1974
How to reach us
Clifton E. “Cliff” Clements,
Publisher
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NEWSROOM
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Government officials
Federal
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president®
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John Cornyn,
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KATHRYN
LOPEZ
EDITORIAL BOARD
Clifton E. “Cliff” Clements
Editor/Publisher
Jim Finley
retired Managing Editor
Jay Eshbach
Community member
Very disheartening
When I first started reading Laura
Ewing’s letter, I was supremely interest-
ed. I agree fully that efforts to teach
reading comprehension and logic are
far below par in this state. I graduated
high school with too many people that
could barely read.
However, the letter takes a drastic
turn near the end. It goes from urging
that we respect the opinions of our edu-
cators in regard to the education
process to demanding classes based
around the Bible. This is very serious
and very disheartening thing to hear
from someone running for the State
Board of Education.
The Bible should not have its own
class in public high schools. Should the
Bible go without a mention? No not at
all. The Bible is an extremely important
text when you use it to reference how it
affected the lives of those in the past, or
how certain works and authors were
affected by its words. With those things
in mind, the Bible should, at most, be
used as a reference tool for other works
of literature.
The current system that gives the
Bible’s historical context in European,
world and early American history as
well as its impact upon the world’s lit-
erature provides inclusion of the Bible
in schools and helps avoid potential
lawsuits.
f-r-e-e-d-o-m
The word for today kids is... free-
dom- That’s F-R-E-E-D-O-M.
Pronounced free-dom. Does everyone
know what this word means?
There are people living in the Peoples
Republic of Baytown that apparently
have know idea what it means. They
use the word a lot. They like to throw it
around. The land of the free, they’re
fighting for our freedoms. We even cel-
ebrated freedom just this month, July
4th. However, when they speak of free-
dom, they mean only their freedom, not
everyone’s.
This would be a laughable issue if it
weren’t so scary. Baggy pants as illegal
sounds stupid. It is. But it is also scary
because there is a lot at stake here. Our
basic freedoms guaranteed by the
Constitution of the United States are
under assault. I know this might upset
some people, but Baytown and Texas
are part of the United States. The
Constitution still applies here.
It doesn’t matter how many signa-
tures you get or how many votes you
get. You don’t get to violate a person’s
civil rights. You can’t change or negate
the Constitution voting on it.
I am of course, speaking of the First
Amendment, located in the Bill of
Rights. You people who are so eager to
legislate your taste do know what the
Bill of Rights is? I don’t think you do.
Maybe you should take a civics course
at our very own Lee College.
There are many things that I find
tasteless and offensive. Backward or
crooked baseball caps, baggy pants,
country music and religion are just a
few. I however, believe in freedom.
That’s real freedom. The kind that
applies to everyone, not just the self-
appointed, self-righteous defenders and
deciders of everyone’s morality. Even
the lowliest and stupidest of our race
has rights. You don’t get to take them
away by voting. The majority is not
always right. Our forefathers wrote the
Constitution the way they did to pre-
vent people like you from doing what
you are trying to do.
Over the course of the summer, the Legislature’s
House Committee on Property Tax Relief and
Appraisal Reform has held public hearings across the
state. And from Hidalgo to Tarrant County, citizens
have.raised two common complaints: Property taxes
are too high, and regular homeowners aren’t getting
fair treatment. Yes, property taxes in Texas are high.
And they’ll remain high as long as taxes on real
property remain the primary source of revenue to pay
for public education.
A ruling from the Texas Supreme Court was neces-
sary to compel lawmakers to give property owners a
tax break by creating a broad-based business activity
tax. Additional relief from shifting the tax base to a
higher sales tax or dare one say it a state income tax
simply isn’t politically feasible at this time.
So the real issues the politically doable issues are
ones of fairness: seeing that property owners get a
fair shake from their appraisal districts and ensuring
that residential homeowners pay their fair share of
property taxes.
No single act would do more to ensure fairness in
property taxes than to make mandatory the sales
price disclosure of real estate transactions. Appraisers
have a relatively easy job assessing homes in working
and middle class neighborhoods. Information on
sales is readily available from public sources.
The prices of exclusive and custom homes, howev-
er, frequently can’t be found through the Multiple
Listing Service. Mandatory disclosure would bring
uniformity to the appraisal process and help equalize
the tax burden among all homeowners.
The real equity in mandatory disclosure, however,
would come from more accurate assessments of
commercial property. Commercial real estate transac-
tions are so closely guarded that appraisal districts
routinely underestimate market values by a wide
margin. Statewide, residential property is assessed at
85 percent of fair market value, commercial property
is assessed at only 60 percent of fair market value.
All homeowners bear the burden of lost revenue from
commercial real estate.
Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, and Rep.
Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, have waged a lonely
and thus far unsuccessful fight on this issue in
Austin. If fellow legislators are serious about proper-
ty tax relief and appraisal reform as well as instilling
more fairness in the property tax process, they’ll join
the effort for mandatory disclosure.
— San Antonio Express-News
Vitae” in the summer of 1968 — went
unheeded.
But we may soon have reason to regret our
embrace of the little white pill. For the first
time, mainstream culture and the left may be
forced to take a look at the side effects of oral
contraceptives. Never mind the women, of
course. Never mind the men and children
affected in various emotional and other ways.
The fish! Have mercy on the fish!
The turnaround won’t come, however, with-
out some whiplash. Ironically, the environ-
mental groups have long been on the same
page as the abortion-industry foot soldiers,
embracing anything that assuages fears of
overpopulation (no longer a worry, as Western
countries, particularly in Europe, face plum-
meting birth rates). “The protection of the
We publish only original
material addressed to The
Baytown Sun bearing the
writer’s signature. An
address and phone number
not for publication should be
included. All letters and
guest columns are subject to
editing, and the Sun
reserves the right to refuse
to publish any submission.
stake in a clean environment because they are
often the main providers of food and water,
and their reproductive health can be adversely
affected by environmental degradation.”
But, Murray writes, “By any standard typi-
pollutant. It does the same thing, just worse, as
other chemicals they call pollutants.”
So what does that mean for us and the fish?
Nothing straight away, Murray tells me.
There’s more than pollution at stake here for
the left, so, expect “outright denial at there
being a problem, obfuscation of the science
when strong arguments are presented, attempts
to deflect attention onto much rarer and less
harmful industrial estrogen, and ad hominem
accusations, in this case an allegation of reli-
gious zealotry/being in the pay of the ‘very
well-funded pro-life industry’ I imagine. The
effort will be based on making it unacceptable
to bring up the issue in polite conversation,
such that anyone who does so will end up stig-
quality of our environment
is impossible in the face of
the present rate of popula-
tion growth,” and therefore,
“Laws, policies, and atti-
tudes that foster population
growth or big families, or
that restrict abortion and
contraception... should be
abandoned; [and] compre-
hensive and realistic birth
control programs should be
available to every member of our society.”
That’s not from Planned Parenthood; it’s a
Siena Club resolution from 1970.
This is from Planned Parenthood:
“Prominent women in the global environmen-
tal movement... believe there are strong links
You’ve already heard about the pregnant
man. But what about the she-man fish?
“Intersex” freshwater fish are all the rage. But
unlike the pregnant man, these scaly androgy-
nes didn’t ask to take on the sexual character-
istics of both genders: humans are doing it to
them. (Where’s the freedom to choose?!) And
the reason these fish are doubling up could
make hash of orthodoxies dating back to the
sexual revolution.
Estrogen pollution from contraceptive and
abortion pills could be the culprit behind these
piscine switcheroos. And thus the two holiest
of holies for the left may be on a collision
course. It promises to be quite the show.
Starting a few years ago, in the Potomac
River, male largemouth bass started popping
up with eggs in their sex organs. The deformi-
ty usually makes reproduction impossible, ulti- between the health of the environment, the
mately hurting the fish population. Many sci-
entists believe the problem could stem from
hormones and other pollutants flushed into our inherent reproductive rights. Women have a
nation’s waterways from sewage-treatment
plants.
In his book “The Really Inconvenient
Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes
Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About —
Because They Helped Cause Them” (Regnery, cally used by environmentalists, the pill is a
2008), Iain Murray writes: “Why don’t we
have more outcries about hormones, and cam-
paigns to save the fish populations? Why
aren’t environmentalists lobbying on Capitol
Hill to keep these chemicals from being
dumped into our rivers?” He answers his own
question: “Maybe because the source of these
chemicals is not some corporate polluter, but
something a little more dear to the Left:
human birth-control pills, morning-after pills,
and abortion pills.”
The contraceptive pill has fundamentally
changed American life, making sex more
casual, morals looser, husbands and wives
more distant. Its messed with women’s fertili-
ty. In short, it has been a game-changer, in
some fundamental and not-so-good ways. And matized (astonishing how often the left resorts
to shame, rather than thinking about guilt).
Some radical Greens may actually be honest
enough to admit there is a problem. They will
be marginalized by the environmental-industri-
from Pope Paul VI in his encyclical “Humanae al-entertainment complex (to paraphrase Fox
'j.------—x Mulder).”
With the science out there, Murray argues
solving the problem wouldn’t be out of the
realm of possibility if we could all be adult
about it. “The EPA and FDA (ought) to have
the courage to do what their counterparts in
the U.K. had the courage to do and label the
pill as the pollutant it is.”
Choice needs to be based on information; it
should always be the result of thoughtful
deliberation. When you interfere with a natural
process, there are consequences, not all of
them good — and you should be mindful of
them. It’s not just fish that end up getting hurt.
fifes
SE4HLER.
____________02008 Jeff Stabler/ DUt. by NEA, Inc.
Federal lawmakers in both houses of Congress
and on both sides of the aisle have been outspo-
ken, particularly toward the end of last week,
about how this do-nothing Congress accomplished
little, but is still eager to take its August recess.
Having said that, they then hopped a plane, train
or car to head home, apparently satisfied with hav-
ing done little or nothing. The country is facing
enormous energy problems that need to be
addressed now, not later.
Their constituents are suffering with gasoline
running nearly $4 a gallon. Your senators and rep-
resentatives couldn’t care less about that, certainly
not enough to shelve the vacation in favor of stay-
ing in Washington and working on the problem.
Congress is suffering through some of its lowest
approval ratings ever, because constituents are dis-
gusted with its inability or unwillingness to gov-
ern. But members aren’t suffering too much,
because they’re taking five weeks off when the
nation is in crisis mode.
It’s good to remember that many of these sena-
tors and representatives will be up for re-election
in November. Review their records carefully, and
remember that no matter how vehemently and self-
righteously they spoke out against it, they’re all
enjoying their five-week recess.
— El Paso Times
U'U w w
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Clements, Clifford E. The Baytown Sun (Baytown, Tex.), Vol. 88, No. 217, Ed. 1 Tuesday, August 5, 2008, newspaper, August 5, 2008; Baytown, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1190964/m1/4/: accessed June 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Sterling Municipal Library.