Rodriguez on Heaven’s Gate Suicides

I know you had to run some sort of piece about the Heaven’s Gate tragedy, but did it have to be written by Richard Rodriguez (Opinion, March 30)? I must confess I’m sick of reading his pieces, filled as they are with facile analogies and rancor toward everyone who doesn’t share his particular interests.

My favorite fallacy in the current Rodriguez column is the paragraph where he somehow equates the lost souls of Heaven’s Gate with neo-paganism (an Earth-based religion whose followers would least of all wish to shed their bodies), with patrons of smoke-free restaurants in Palo Alto (a group trying to protect rather than mutilate themselves), and with early American Puritans (who carved a life from the wilderness in a way the Heaven’s Gaters never could have done).

The next time a tragedy such as Heaven’s Gate occurs, please send us for insight to someone other than Rodriguez, whose comments so rarely have anything to offer beyond finger-pointing.

BRIAN NELSON

Woodland Hills

* Rodriguez writes: “The pounding surf’s . . . finitude” and “because the ocean reminds us of land’s end.” He seems to have a lemming attitude toward the sea. Fortunately for him, his forebears thought differently and saw the oceans as an enticement to exploration; millions of people throughout the ages have thought the same. It seems to me that for any religious or cult group this perspective is just as likely, if not more so, to be the attraction of settling by an ocean, for it represents not only the essence of life but the possibility of a new world beyond its horizon.

He states: “Enter the realm called cyberspace where all information is available to you.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Cyberspace is limited. Cyberspace may be a more extensive and varied single medium of information and misinformation, but does it have all information? I think not.

AURIEL K. SANDERSON

Calabasas

* Jonestown, Waco and now Rancho Santa Fe. All in the name of religion. If any group had a track record like this, the politicians would be falling all over themselves to pass new laws to protect the people involved.

BOB HARDMAN

Orange

* Long after my memory of this tragedy has blurred, I will vividly recall the local resident who so quaintly separated the victims from their neighbors in a fleeting television moment:

“They were renters. They weren’t Rancho Santa Fe people.”

ED SCHAEFFER

Pomona

* I was appalled to find the “recipe” for the brand of suicide used by the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in The Times (March 28). Reporting that they used a pheno- barbital/alcohol mixture would have been quite sufficient. To report with which good stuff to eat it was blended, and then directions to “lie back and relax” was way beyond responsible reporting. Some facts we don’t want to see in print.

DAWN THOMAS

Laguna Niguel