The Press-Dispatch
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B-4 Wednesday, March 28, 2018 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Easter is but a few days away and Christianity will celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Yes there are doubters, but the hope of all eternity still shines bright. The apostle Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth "O Death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory? " in re- sponse to those who questioned Jesus' resurrection. The resurrection of Christ from the grave is the linchpin of Christi- anity and is what sets it apart from all other religions. Without the res- urrection, as Paul wrote, "…your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have per- ished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable." The Good News of a living Christ is more than encouraging social justice and good works. The faith preached of a living Christ is a matter of death and life. The church of the first century preached a Christ of the cross who succumbed to death. Death cannot be escaped, but Christ conquered death which brings life to a hopeless ex- istence. Christianity offers no elixir or refuge from death. Sin en- tered the world, and all die. But Christ en- tered the world and conquered death and gave life! Death does not have the final say. The apostle Paul wrote, "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive." Life through the res- urrection of Jesus Christ has the final say. Likewise, the early church preached His Life as a risen Sav- ior. Death and life is entwined and cannot be separated. The joy of life is the antidote for the fear of death by confronting it with a risen Christ! Christ lived a transcendent life as He confronted death as He ministered. The Church is com- missioned to preach a message that all who embrace Christ will also pass from death unto life! Baptism confronts death and gives life. Paul wrote to the Church at Rome, "Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism in- to death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Fa- ther, even so we also should walk in newness of life." Baptism is our cross of death. The penalty of sin has been extracted, but the gift of God is eternal life. The very fact that we celebrate the Eucharist [communion] is a re- minder that life emerged from sin and darkness; death had to enve- lope the Savior. Sunday reminds the church Christ has risen from the dead. Jesus was resurrected on the first Minority View by Walter E. Williams The Weekly by Alden Heuring Not always like this Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Celebrate life Saluting school choice for military families Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Americans who join the military know they'll be making sacrifices. They put their lives on the line, obviously, but beyond that, they know they'll have no say in where they live. Indeed, frequent moves are often part of the package. The service member in ques- tion may understand and accept this, but what about the sacrifices of his or her children? They'll be moving, too. That means not only a new home and new neighbors, but a new school. Which one will they attend? Not a whole lot of choice there, either. It's going to be the closest public school to their new home, regard- less of how good it is — or wheth- er it's the right fit. That's a tough break, you may say, but do we really need to ad- dress this? And besides, what can anyone do? The reason we should address this is straightforward: Besides simple fairness and wanting to do right by our service members, it's not a stretch to say this can affect military readiness. How? Retention rates. Many mil- itary families are unhappy with their present school situations. As educa- tion expert Lindsey Burke writes in a re- cent paper: "In a survey con- ducted by the Mil- itary Times, more than a third of read- ers (who are military personnel) said deci- sions about whether to remain in the military hinged in large part on dissatisfaction with their children's education. More- over, 80 percent of children from military families currently attend public schools, but only 34 percent of those surveyed said they would choose public schools as their first option." That's a high level of dissatisfac- tion. So what can we do about it? Quite simply, we can extend the benefits of school choice to mili- tary families. If that sounds a bit radical, it shouldn't. For one thing, school choice is becoming more and more the norm nationwide. But even if it wasn't, this approach mimics what service members themselves have enjoyed for de- cades through the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill, of course, dates back to the World War II era. It was enacted to as- sist returning mili- tary personnel to get the education they needed and better adjust to civilian life. Part of that meant helping former ser- vice members pay for college — at a university of their choosing. It was, in effect, an early form of school choice that followed the ser- vice member to whatever school he picked. That's all this would do. Except instead of paying for the service member's college, it would pay for his or her children's education at an elementary school or high school of their choice. The scenic route Holy week Continued on page 6 Continued on page 6 Continued on page 5 Continued on page 5 For protection against criminals, the second amendment is the only Constitutional right Lucid Moments by Bart Stinson Police are on our side, for the most part, and many of them lay their lives on the line nightly to serve and protect fellow Amer- icans and immigrants in neigh- borhoods that the rest of us avoid. But do they have a legal duty to re- spond quickly or effectively to our 9 -1-1 calls? No. If police arrive in time to pre- vent a tragedy, that's nice, but it's up to them. They aren't legally ob- ligated to dispatch, patrol or oper- ate well. It's been litigated from dif- ferent angles, and it was eventual- ly settled by the Supreme Court. In March 1975, two men kicked down a Washington DC single mother's door and raped her. Two upstairs neighbors heard her screams, called 9 -1-1 and were told help was on the way. But it wasn't. When they didn't arrive for 12 minutes, the neighbors called 9 - 1-1 again and were told again to sit tight, that police were coming. One shouted down to encourage the downstairs mom that police were en route. This alerted the rapists to the women upstairs. They broke in- to the upstairs apartment, kid- napped all three women at knife- point, and for the next 14 hours, beat them, raped them, robbed them and forced them to perform sexual acts on one another. The victims later sued the District of Co- lumbia municipal gov- ernment, which em- ploys the police. The government fought the women's lawsuit and did not settle out of court. That city, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in America, argued in court that its police owed no specific du- ty to the brutalized victims. The courts agreed. The Supreme Court settled the law on this issue in a 2005 ruling. In that case, police failed to en- force a court order against a Colo- rado ex-husband who abducted his three daughters, ages 7, 9 and 10. The girls' mother reported the ab- duction and violation of the court order, and provided reliable infor- mation on their location, but police did not follow up. The ex-husband later shot his three girls dead. The bereaved moth- er later sued, based on the court order's lan- guage that "you shall arrest" the violator. When the lawsuit reached its final ap- peal, the Court held that the fatal inaction was "within a well-es- tablished tradition of police discretion" de- spite "apparently mandatory ar- rest statutes." The law of the land, since 2005, is that you have no le- gal right to police protection. You do, however, have a legal right to keep and bear arms. The government is Constitutionally prohibited to infringe that right. And so you have a capacity, if you can keep it, to protect yourself, your daughters and your down- stairs neighbor from violent crim- inals. The 2nd Amendment was un- der attack Saturday, just across town from where the three wom- My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. One of the unavoidable trage- dies of youth is the temptation to think that what is seen today has always been. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in our responses to the recent Parkland, Fla., mas- sacre. Part of the responses to those murders are calls to raise the age to purchase a gun and to have more thorough background checks — in a word, to make gun purchases more difficult. That's a vision that sees easy gun availabil- ity as the problem; thus, the solu- tion is to reduce that availability. The vision that sees "easy" avail- ability as the problem ignores the fact of U.S. history that guns were far more available yesteryear (http://tinyurl.com/y73sw4ev). With truly easy gun availability, there was nowhere near the gun mayhem and murder that we see today. I'm tempted to ask those who believe that guns are today's problem whether they think that guns were nicer yesteryear. What about the calls for bans on the AR- 15 so-called assault rifle? It turns out that according to 2016 FBI sta- tistics, rifles accounted for 368 of the 17,250 homicides in the U.S. that year. That means restrictions on the purchase of rifles would do little or nothing for the homicide rate. Leaders of the gun control movement know this. Their calls for more restrictive gun laws are part of a larger strategy to outlaw gun ownership. Gun ownership is not our prob- lem. Our problem is a widespread decline in moral values that has nothing to do with guns. That de- cline includes disrespect for those in authority, disrespect for one- self, little accountability for anti- social behavior and a scuttling of religious teachings that reinforced moral values. Let's examine ele- ments of this decline. If any of our great-grandparents or even grandparents who passed away before 1960 were to return, they would not believe the kind of personal behavior all too common today. They wouldn't believe that youngsters could get away with cursing and assaulting teachers (http://tinyurl.com/ya5zhyu6). They wouldn't believe that some school districts, such as Phila- delphia's, employ more than 400 school police officers. During my primary and secondary schooling, from 1942 to 1954, the only time one saw a policeman in school was during an assembly period where we had to listen to a boring lec- ture on safety. Our ancestors al- so wouldn't believe that we're now debating whether teachers should be armed. There are other forms of behav- ior that would have been deemed grossly immoral yesteryear. There are companies such as National Debt Relief, CuraDebt and Lend- ingTree, which advertise that they will help you to avoid paying all the money you owe. So after you and a seller agree to terms of a sale, if you fail to live up to your half of the bar- gain, there are companies that will assist you in ripping off the seller. There are companies that coun- sel senior citizens on how to shel- ter their assets from nursing home care costs. For example, a surviv- ing spouse may own a complete- ly paid-for home that's worth $500,000. The costs of nursing home care might run $50,000 a year. By selling her house, she could pay the nursing home costs, but her children wouldn't inherit the house. There are firms that come in to shelter her assets so that she can bequeath her home to her heirs and leave taxpayers to foot the nursing home bill. In my book, that's immoral, but it is so common that most of us give it no thought. There is one moral failing that is devastating to the future of our na- tion. That failing, which has wide acceptance by the American peo- ple, is the idea that Congress has the authority to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another American. That is noth- ing less than legalized theft and accounts for roughly three-quar- ters of federal spending. For the Christians among us, we should consider that when God gave Mo- ses the commandment "Thou shalt not steal," he probably didn't mean thou shalt not steal unless you get a majority vote in the U.S. Congress. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason Uni- Greetings from Arizona! We've just returned from a friend's wed- ding out west in the state of dry heat, and it was quite the climate shock switching from snow to des- ert and back to sleet. We flew out of the Louisville airport, and so our route from home to plane was almost 90 percent Interstate 64. As we moved further and fur- ther down the road, the snow piled up higher and higher, and our esti- mated time of arrival got later and later due to some unknown trou- ble about 20 miles out from the air- port. A fter our GPS had tacked on a solid hour of sit-in-gridlock time, we decided to look for a plan B and ended up taking a county road for about 10 miles running parallel to 64. This was one of the best deci- sions we made the whole trip. The road was enclosed by an arch of trees with occasional clearings where lakes and country estates peeked out from the wood. As I said, everything was covered in snow. Every branch, every roof, every mailbox looked like a paint- ing on a Christmas card - and this was the middle of March, mind you. We puttered past the traffic jam surrounded by a winter won- derland on all sides, and popped out right on schedule to make our flight. That pleasantly surprising de- tour reminded me of a situation that happens often in life. We hang on to plans we've made until things seem hopeless, but when we final- ly let go of having it our way, we discover that the detour is much better than what we had wanted in the first place. What I took away from that drive to Louisville is to embrace the detours that life presents to us. It can be really hard sometimes to take off our tunnel vision and allow our plans to change, but it's often more than worth the effort. Anyway, that's my little bit of words this week. I hope you all have an outstanding Holy Week, and I'll see you again next time! As we continue the journey to- wards the Holy week of Lenten sea- son, I pay attention to great arti- cles that inspire us to set our spirits right. Here's one I came across that was shared with me by a pastor. There is a delightful story about a 9 year old boy who was terribly afraid of the dark. One night his fa- ther told him to go to the barn and feed the horses. The boy turned pale and began to tremble. With that the father stepped onto the porch with the boy, lit a lantern, and held it up. Then he said to his son, "How far can you see? " The boy replied, "I can see half- way to the barn." The father gave the lantern to the son and said, "Carry it halfway to the barn." When the boy reached the halfway point, the father called out, "How far can you see now? " The boy held up the lantern and shouted, "I can see the barn and the barn door." The father called out, " Walk to the barn door." When the boy shouted back that he had reached the barn door, the father called out, " Now open the door and tell me what you see." The boy opened the door and shouted back, "I can see inside the barn. I can see the horses! " "Good, replied his father, "Now feed them." • • • This story brings to me sever- al set of thoughts. First, it seems in life we encounter many of these moments when we get afraid of what's in store ahead of us. Howev-