Letters to the Editor

>GLBT 'issues'

Your recent opinion regarding Obama and Clinton not addressing your "GBLT issues" ("Candidates silent to GLBT issues," April 15) shows that you are offensively out of touch with Americans and their values. You have loudly proclaimed that you are on board with the GBLT crowd's radical agenda of restructuring our society to meet their desires. But any time people vote on whether they want these changes, they have clearly said they don't.

The GBLT agenda is a pseudo-religious movement that aims to define a deviant sexuality as the most significant factor of discovering "self." Personally, I cannot think of a more ridiculously unimportant characteristic of one's humanity than sexuality. Wouldn't you consider it offensive of me if I went around declaring to people that my most significant defining characteristic as a person is that I prefer doggy-style? Of course you would. But because someone's sexuality is deviant I am supposed to believe that flaunting that fact to the world is somehow necessary for their personal relationship with the universe? That's a pseudo-religious belief that no religion should have forced upon them.

You claim in your last paragraph that addressing faith in politics is critical if the candidates want to unify our diverse country. Do you think that forcing your moral judgment upon a religion that is not your own is a unifying move? I think that is precisely the tyrannical kind of move which caused our founding fathers to pen the phrase "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Your "holier-than-thou" attitude is offensive. Religions have the right to decide how their framework of morality is defined. Even Obama and Clinton know this. You could learn a lot from them regarding respect for another's point of view.

Brian Cox

University student

Administration failing on light-rail issue

Failing to be persuasive on the field of reason, University administration is enlisting Regents to engage in melodrama over the light rail. The administration's presentation to the Board of Regents, summarized in the April 14 Daily article, did not mention the overwhelming benefits in safety and health of diverting four lanes of vehicular traffic on Washington Avenue away from the heart of campus. It also did not present the alternative vehicular routes available for clients of the academic health service. It is time for University administration to embrace a solution that corrects the serious design mistake of the last century that mixed heavy car and truck traffic with pedestrians in the middle of campus. Perhaps the new University sustainability coordinator and the College of Design could help them move into the 21st Century.

Les Everett

program coordinator

University Water Resources Center

Universities as businesses

An article published in Monday's Daily discussed a "rethinking conference" regarding university corporatization. The author, Courtney Sinner, summarized the problem of "running the university like a business" and how it "results in problems like rising tuition and low wages for non-tenured professors."

These issues have become more evident in recent years with the rising costs of higher education. The problem, as I see it, starts with capitalism. When a person pays the university tuition they become not only a student but a customer of the institution, which inherently make the University a business, responsible for providing an acceptable product in exchange for tuition, in this case a degree.

The root of the problem is not how universities are structured, but how higher education is structured. As long as people exchange money for a degree like a product, the University will be structured as a corporation and operated like a business.

Chris Dana

University student

Not charged doesn't mean not guilty

Dropped sexual assault charges mean only that the accused assailant is not being charged; it by no means indicates that an assault did not take place, or that anything that did happen was consensual. There are lots of reasons charges might be dropped, most often because the victim feels too defeated from the beginning to go through the emotionally exhausting criminal process. Not only is there a clear sexual double standard in our culture that condemns women's sexuality, articles like Jake Grovum's trial coverage piece in the April 15 issue make rape seem like just another shameful event in a woman's "sexual history." The woman in question did not "have sex" with the three football players; she was sexually assaulted. This is part of her history of victimization, not her sexual history. Not being charged or found guilty of a crime does not mean the crime did not occur. Just ask O.J.

Jackie Heard

University student