Snapshots From a Kinder, Gentler Age
These are happy times for California right-wingers.
Orange County Reps. Robert K. Dornan and William E. Dannemeyer, having dutifully pledged liberty and justice for all, petition the Irvine City Council to withhold its equal-opportunity ordinance. Dannemeyer sends The Times a Bible-thumping jeremiad against homosexuals. Dornan becomes man of the hour for the Republicans, those law-and-order types who hired guards to police the polls in Latino precincts and brought Oliver North to Orange County as a hero.
A pastor in Huntington Beach welcomes into his church Jew haters who claim to disbelieve the Holocaust.
The National Rifle Assn. defends the right of an unregulated one-man militia to bear an AK-47. It’s a sporting weapon, the NRA says, capable of pumping 20 bullets into a savage buck deer in seconds. The NRA has not so far upheld the constitutional right of children in Stockton and Los Angeles to life and domestic tranquility.
The niggardly Jarvis and Gann propositions force security cuts at a Santa Monica medical health clinic. A patient murders the unprotected, dedicated, professional Robbyn Panitch.
It’s hard to remember that we live in the kinder, gentler age.
BERNARD HIMES
Laguna Niguel
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