LETTERS

LITTLE ROCK — Holding a flimsy bag

I consider myself fortunate to live in an area with a great newspaper, and I didn’t even mind it too much when the price increased.

What I do mind is walking out on a Sunday morning and picking up a completely saturated and unreadable mass of pulp, unusable in newspaper form because the bag is so cheap that it won’t keep the water out and tears just as soon as it skids to a stop on my driveway.

Please insist that your circulation department provide its carriers with better-quality bags for delivery.

RICHARD WEAVER

Greenbrier

A useful sleeping aid

Okay, okay, okay-I give up.

We’ve been force-fed Philip Martin to the point that I’m willing to concede. He is the Hillbilly Gore Vidal.

Now, will someone please convince him to write a movie review or a column that the average person is capable of, or more importantly, willing to actually finish reading?

The guy puts me to sleep faster than Nyquil.

GARY O’NEAL

Russellville

Not worthy of article

Re the front-page article that included “13% of ZIP codes prove fake” in the headline: While this makes for a great headline, the article by Chad Day completely misrepresented the situation.

Once I read the complete article, I noted that of the more than 130,000 holders of concealed-carry permits in the state, a mere 134 had bad ZIP codes, and 58 more had ZIP codes in other states.

That is far less than the 13 percent that the headline implies.

As a retired auditor, 134 errors in a population of over 130,000 represents an insignificant problem hardly worthy of a front-page article. I congratulate the Arkansas State Police for good data collection.

Shame on the editors for publishing this disingenuous article.

DENNIS L. BOSCH Hot Springs

Editor’s note: A correction was published on February 12.

Transcendent reports

Bryan Hendricks’ recent musing on presidential skeet shooting reminded me of past articles about the guys who shot a fish and the fellow who shot a nursing feral sow.

This kind of reporting certainly transcends “sports,” and I think it would fit well in any section of your paper.

CHET STORTHZ

Little Rock

Treat warriors better

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Jim Kipp. Like me, he sees the way our returning boys are treated.

It bothers me so much that a dear grandson of mine went into the National Guard right out of high school, became a sniper and went straight over to the sand pile where a roadside bomb caused the turret to come down on his head.

He came home and had he not had wonderful parents, the last couple of years would really have been another bad time. He washed dishes, did whatever odd jobs he could get and leaned on family. Uncle Sam has really missed the mark. Mention something like a veterans home and it’s “Not in my neighborhood.”

Makes you really wonder, doesn’t it?

PEGGY WOLFE

Pangburn

Dishonesty in stance

Organized opposition to legal abortion is, I believe, based on several kinds of dishonesty.

Opponents pretend abortion didn’t exist before 1973. It did. The reason to make abortion legal was to make it safe: to end back-alley abortions that ruined women’s health and sometimes killed them. Opponents misuse language; they call a fetus, embryo or fertilized cell a “baby,” thus confusing medically ignorant people into thinking an early abortion equals infanticide.

Opponents usurp the term “pro-life,” although they don’t seem to care about animals, plants or humans, once born. They ignore many dangers to the fetus such as mercury or pesticide pollution, malnutrition, and domestic violence, and the many fetuses that die from war and famine in other countries.

They dismiss the potential for preventing unwanted pregnancies through the use of contraception. They bypass the very real connection between abortion and economics; opponents don’t link someone’s choice of abortion with low wages, or the pay gap between men and women, or lack of paid sick leave and maternity leave. Western European nations with social safety nets for women and children have much lower abortion rates than the U.S.

Some social conservatives, once focused on opposition to school desegregation, moved to abortion apparently as a more “righteous” issue. But if not for all the self-righteous hypocrisy, we might actually be able to lower abortion rates while keeping the procedure legal.

CORALIE KOONCE

Fayetteville

Real war on women

The war on women, I believe, is not perpetuated by men seeking to limit access to birth control and abortion. The real war on women is the effort to devalue the lives of young ladies by convincing them that it is acceptable to share their bodies indiscriminately with men who walk away because a woman’s right to choose frees men from any and all responsibility.

Birth control and abortion are false safety nets that encourage promiscuity and take away the inherent God-given value of female human life. Instead of protecting our girls, we offer them up as sacrifice to the moral decline of our society and now go so far as to offer them up to death in military combat.

As a mother, am I supposed to tell my daughters that their value is measured by the extent to which the government is willing to provide them with freebies?

Perhaps the worst part about this “war” on women is that it is, in fact, perpetuated not by men but by other women.

SHANNON CALLAHAN

Little Rock

Disgusted by request

I really thought the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette could be trusted in limited situations. Now, I find that the Democrat-Gazette requested information on who has concealed-weapon permits in Arkansas.

I really thought that was a specialty of the northern liberal newspapers.

Disgusting!

DENNY EPPERSON

Conway