LETTERS

— Prove it is a problem

State Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, and others who support a voter-ID bill to combat voter fraud should, at the very least, provide evidence that voter fraud is a problem in Arkansas. Otherwise, that emperor has no clothes.

If they forge ahead regardless, any such bill should provide for a free ID with registration in the future and retroactively. Free, because one that costs would constitute a poll tax of unhappy memory.

DAVID SIXBEY

Flippin

Show affection daily

’Tis the season for us all to show love and affection toward one another, which really shouldn’t take a holiday to remind us what we should do daily. Jesus said we are to love one another as we love ourselves. This includes people we don’t even know.

It reminds me of a Sunday three years ago during the Christmas season. I was on my way to church from Fayetteville to Lowell, running late as usual, when I got behind a car creeping along. I got aggravated. Then the car started weaving and I thought, what was this person doing out on the road? Then I was burdened with the question of what was going on with this driver and I just started praying for him/her.

When we finally reached a light and were side by side, I saw that it was a woman and she was crying. I smiled at her and then I started crying. We went our separate ways, but I continued praying that she would find comfort and hope.

Compassion, patience, a helping hand are all ways of showing love toward one another, even strangers. It can make a difference, even if we never see the end result.

CARLA COUCH FARRISH

Fayetteville

Fat surely in fire now

The president’s State of the Union speech, given on the same day as Mardi Gras, gave new meaning to “Fat Tuesday.”

BOB HUSTON

Holiday Island

Real bear of a reason

Asa Hutchinson’s explanation that he needed a .45-caliber gun with a 13-bullet magazine so he could go hiking in Alaska and protect himself from grizzly bears brings the Second Amendment into a clearer perspective for me.

Clearly the founding fathers meant the amendment to guarantee “the right to arm bears,” allowing them to protect themselves from dangerous invaders like Hutchinson, who was encroaching on their native habitat.

Shoot to kill, grizzlies!

DAVID JOLLIFFE

Fayetteville

Allows cruel suffering

Comparing the Sandy Hook victims with all the yearly aborted fetuses here in America is way off the tracks of logic. The Sandy Hook victims were so knowingly in bliss with life and absorbed with love at home. Aborted fetuses never had life or know anything about it.

Life can’t begin until you start living, and that doesn’t happen until you leave the womb. In the womb you are a developing and functioning body that knows absolutely nothing.

Among some of these aborted fetuses could be many future murderers if they are allowed to live and develop into ones. More often than not, a child who is unwanted and uncared for usually grows up with deep, accumulating resentments toward the child that is blessed and wanted. In many cases, this results with the deprived child victimizing the blessed child as they go into adulthood.

Violence between the deprived and the blessed will only worsen as we roll into the future with the work force getting smaller due to all the inventions nowadays of automated devices that can do almost everything better than humans can.

It stuns me when I see on TV those bony little kids who are so starved that they are trying to catch flies to eat. I personally think allowing something to become alive only to know suffering is more cruel than stopping it from becoming alive and sparing it from suffering.

GARY McLEHANEY

Benton

Not a man’s decision

My thanks to Roger A. Webb of Little Rock and Richard Bullard of Stuttgart. It’s gratifying to see two men who are willing to stand up for women.

Until a man goes through the morning sickness, mood swings due to hormonal imbalance, the extra weight, the pain of delivery, and possible postpartum depression, all due to pregnancy, especially an unwanted one or one in which the doctor has told the mother her child will be born with a serious abnormality, he has no right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body.

Before Roe v. Wade came into being, abortions were done by nonmedical persons in nonsterile locations, and that is what will happen again if the law is rescinded.

JODIE HARPER

Hot Springs

Protecting kids’ lives

I don’t believe that any of the bills that were proposed against abortions could be considered an attack on women. The bills are to protect the life of the children, not take away the rights of the mother.

Abortion is killing a living being, and killing a living being is murder. If a person has a heartbeat and can feel pain, like a fetus can at 20 weeks, what right does anyone have to take away that life?

Outlawing abortions would not prevent mothers from making decisions about their children. While it may not have been their choice to get pregnant, they have the choice of keeping the child or giving it to a family that would love it.

Letter-writer Bev Lindsey says that the Legislature needs to help women and children, not hurt them. I think that is exactly what legislators are doing.

LAYLA SCOTT

Sherwood

Government isn’t bad

I am tired of hearing people cry about “big government.” I am over 80 years old, and I remember our government giving my family jobs in the CCC and WPA during the Great Depression. I stood in lines to get a free apple many a time.

Our big government made it possible for a lot of World War II vets to go to college who would otherwise not have been able to go. A Republican president built our major interstate highways when we were still in debt from the second World War. Hoover Dam was built during the Depression; all that energy and water now feed a lot of people these days.

If we let the Tea Party and the right-wingers have their way, our country will go down the tubes, for it takes great vision to make our nation the best nation on Earth-and these people have none.

JOHN W. WILSON

Jacksonville

Editorial, Pages 15 on 02/19/2013

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