Faith and politics in America; another look at CEQA; defending Prop. 8 in court

Politics and the pulpit

Re “Pastors heed a political calling,” Sept. 11

I was deeply dismayed to read about the pastors who are becoming politically active ahead of the 2012 election. They do not speak for the thousands of Christians like me who refuse to have our politics defined by a handful of vague biblical references to abortion or homosexuality.

Do they read the same Bible I do? What shapes my political worldview are the pervasive references to caring for the poor. What would Jesus do? My guess is that he’d advocate for programs providing food, shelter, education and healthcare for the poor and middle class.

I hope that The Times gives equal time to someone like the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who can articulate another message for Christians who want to address the ills of this country in the next election.

Marian Sunabe

South Pasadena

This article should have been on the Op-Ed page. Three pages of alarm about some conservative pastors getting involved in an effort to protect their religious value system? How unpatriotic of them. Imagine, they believe in right and wrong and want to see their beliefs protected from ethical relativists.

The glaring omission is any mention of the fact that President Obama was organizing churches in Chicago for many years. The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. espoused his “black liberation theology” at Trinity United Church of Christ, a mega-church in Chicago with more than 8,000 members. Obama supposedly sat in the pews there for years but did not hear any of the hateful rhetoric. Really!

The 2012 election will probably be determined by the votes of independents. Hopefully, they will do the right thing.

Doug McDermott

El Segundo

The evangelical pastors featured in The Times’ story cannot be faulted for their political activism, which is protected under the 1st Amendment. The problem is their distortion of the Christian faith.

How can any sensitive Christian support the death penalty, the proliferation of firearms, unjust wars of choice, the dismantling of the social safety net, increased riches for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, the rejection of medical coverage for the poor, the continual domination of American life by corporations and the rest of the Bachmann-Perry agenda?

When a significant slice of the church loses its hold on everything Jesus stood for, the problem is religious heresy, not political activism.

Charles H. Bayer

Claremont

From the IRS tax code: “To be exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization … may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

Pretty simple: Tax the churches.

Dave Dolnick

Thousand Oaks

CEQA reform

Re “CEQA and the art of the deal,” Editorial, Sept. 12

Is California’s regulatory red tape inhibiting our growth and ability to make good-land use decisions?

The Times presents the California Environmental Quality Act’s nuanced role as both a valuable tool for blocking destructive undertakings and a

vehicle for anti-competitive delays. But what regulator in Sacramento has the Solomon-like wisdom to balance the benefits of economic development against the costs of damage to environmental assets?

Instead, what if developers were required to post a bond to be held in escrow? The developer would lose this money if a panel of experts hired by the state determined that the project caused significant environmental damage. Projects posting this bond would be fast-tracked. Developers would gain certainty over the investment process while being put on the hook for malfeasance.

Matthew E. Kahn

Los Angeles

There’s no need to defend Prop. 8

Re “Prop. 8’s best defense,” Editorial, Sept. 12

If it was the will of the people to defend Proposition 8, why didn’t they elect Meg Whitman as governor and Steve Cooley as attorney general, both of whom said they would defend the proposition in court?

ProtectMarriage ran a mean-spirited campaign full of lies, distortions and vilification of lesbians and gays. Recent polling shows that a majority of Californians support marriage equality.

Let’s not waste time and money on defending the indefensible.

Greg Korte

Long Beach

Proposition 8 has already lost in federal court. Why should the state continue to spend money defending the law if it feels it cannot win on appeal? Not all cases warrant an appeal.

Bill Chartier

Los Angeles

More Reagan than Roosevelt

Re “Obama’s jobs push conjures up FDR,” Column, Sept. 12

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic interventionist policies did not get the country out of the Depression, just as President Obama’s policies are not getting us out of the great recession. As well intended as the New Deal policies may have been, the unemployment rate was still 19% in 1938.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau stated the following in 1939:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work .... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot.”

Rudy Alvarez

Pacific Palisades

FDR created jobs for the unemployed by building infrastructure on a massive scale. He also put in place regulations to prevent a reoccurrence of the bank failures and the stock crash. Unfortunately, many of these safety factors have been removed in the last 20 years.

The nation needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to maintain its infrastructure, and Obama is advocating only $50 billion. He has pushed no significant regulations on those who caused the current crash. He also is spending money on tax breaks for those who don’t need them.

This is more Ronald Reagan than FDR.

Larry Severson

Fountain Valley

For prisoners

Re “Female inmates’ in-home custody,” Sept. 13

At last, our Legislature has succeeded in passing public safety legislation that makes sense.

Some neighborhoods have been devastated by the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” mentality that has driven public safety legislation over the last 30 years.

Keeping the perpetrators of non-serious and non-sexual offenses in prison while their children languish in foster care makes absolutely no sense.

The present overcrowding of our prisons is not the result of a crime wave but of increased, politically-driven sentencing laws.

The real question is, why are the perpetrators of non-serious crimes being sentenced to prison instead of supervised probation in the first place?

Laurel Gord

Venice

It’s still war

Re “The ‘safe war’ oxymoron,” Opinion, Sept. 11

Does Naomi Klein miss the days when men fought wars hand to hand in open fields? If not, why the special attention to aerial warfare?

Inflicting damage from afar to avoid casualties is a strategy as old as human conflict. Klein thinks it’s counterproductive: Someone may get the “extraordinarily dangerous” idea that we value our lives more than we value theirs. But what really strikes the anti-warriors as dangerous is the majority of Americans whose gut reaction to foreign attack is a desire to retaliate.

Klein says she was sure the “unsanitized look” at aerial warfare that Americans got on 9/11 would “change our hearts forever.” That’s liberal-speak for, “I thought this country would finally learn its lesson.”

Michael Smith

Cynthiana, Ky.