Readers React: Oversimplifying complex issues: Both parties do it

To the editor: Jonah Goldberg doesn’t hold anything back when he condemns as “staggeringly clueless” those who show they don’t know how the political process works by actually believing that one senator from one state can ban birth control. He, tongue in cheek perhaps, suggests that they “shouldn’t vote at all.” (“Why Lena Dunham shouldn’t be allowed to vote,” Op-Ed, Nov. 3)

Perhaps Goldberg would have an IQ test to determine who votes, since this idea subtly underlies the Constitution, written that way by 55 propertied and educated white guys who excluded slaves and women.

In fact, both parties use simplicities to obtain votes. Single-focus issues — taxes, the size of government, assistance for those without the normal resources of life — are the only way support can be mobilized from the constituencies of the parties, and money for effective ads supersedes it all.

We shouldn’t be foolish about how votes are engendered.

Ralph Mitchell, Monterey Park

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To the editor: Goldberg’s column in response to Lena Dunham’s “5 Reasons Why I Vote (and You Should Too)” on the Planned Parenthood website is an insult to young women and anyone who’s pro-choice.

Dunham (seen “dancing in her dingy underwear” in a Rock the Vote commercial, as Goldberg sniped) expresses herself in a manner designed to connect with young female voters, not cranky middle-aged columnists.

But I don’t know which aspect of Goldberg’s column is more ludicrous—the suggestion that someone’s right to vote should be nullified simply due to an expression of opinion (or even ignorance, as he claims), or the notion that a Republican running for office wants to expand women’s reproductive rights.

Karen Lafferty, Santa Monica

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