Another man speaks against women's health issue

Another man speaks against women's health issue

I'm wondering if I'm the only one who noticed yet another man who has decided whether it is OK or not for women to have more extensive "supplemental ultrasonography" mammograms.

Maybe this male letter writer doesn't have a wife, mother, sister or friend who has been stricken with breast cancer. I have had several of these. I have lost a best friend, Teresa, 23; a friend, Sandy, 25; a mother-in-law, 45; and numerous other friends and colleagues have been stricken with this disease. I also worry about my 35-year-old daughter with dense breast tissue.

You can bet if it were a testicular or prostate issue, this man would be ready for any and every test they offered him. There is no amount of money worth a woman losing her life to breast cancer.

Carol Davis

Deatsville

Webber Building's loss sad for city

As a historian, I am saddened to learn that the old Webber Building, formerly the building used by the Montgomery Theater just before and after the Civil War, will be torn down instead of being restored.

I understand that large portions of its façade collapsed, but it is too bad that the rest of the structure was not saved for posterity and the collapsed portion rebuilt. The music of the famous song "Dixie" was written on one of the building's interior walls so that the song could be translated into a band score (the song was played by a band at the inauguration of President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy in early 1861). The infamous actor John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, also performed in the building, when it was a theater.

Tearing down this building would be like tearing down Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.

Daniel Haulman

Montgomery

Understand reality of publicly funded shelters

In its revised form, HB85 would have required taxpayer-funded animal shelters/control centers to track intake, adoption and euthanasia numbers and make them available to the public.

The bill's thunderous defeat in the House was attributable, allegedly, to lack of funds and anticipated harassment from "animal activists." Regardless of the validity (or not) of these reasons, the House missed an opportunity to bounce a reality check off Alabamians.

Taxpayer-funded shelters aren't "no kill." They normally are required to take the unwanted senior dog, the litter of feral cats, the mother dog and puppies dumped on a cul-de-sac, the "leftovers" a backyard breeder couldn't sell, all animals brought to them.

The shelters use adoption and rescue to reduce their inventory. But when they are out of space, euthanasia is inevitable.

What is wrong with transparency, providing the numbers, the price in lives lost for irresponsibility? The "animal activists" should focus on pet owners who don't spay and neuter their cats and dogs; the Alabama State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners, which wants want to cripple the low-cost spay/neuter clinics; and elected officials who don't enforce codes and regulations.

Put the stats on the county or city website and make them available 24/7. The shelter is not to blame; it all falls back on people.

Lu Moseley

Oxford

Moon blind to truth about religious freedom

Josh Moon criticizes those states whose laws protect the religious activity of citizens from the reach of government equalization laws, saying that discrimination is un-American. But religious freedom means exactly the freedom to discriminate.

Someone's religion, whether you agree with it or not, means they get to discriminate between foods -- avoiding some while eating others. It means discriminating between days by not working certain days of the week and putting up a "Closed" sign. It means discriminating between marriage created by God and same-sex sexual coupling. It means discriminating between what is good and what is evil, and it means neither the civil government nor I nor Josh Moon can do anything about it.

But we've entered a "New World." Josh, does your memory go back 13 years? That's when consensual sodomy was a criminal act. And it had been a crime for millennia.

Then the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas said the state of Texas couldn't criminalize it any longer. That's when the law was turned upside down and wrong became right. But if wrong becomes right, then it's axiomatic that right will become wrong.

And Moon proves it when he abominates those who can't support same-sex coupling being sanctioned as a good thing. Discrimination against those who stand up for biblical morality is OK under the First Amendment, right, Josh? Or are you so blind that you can't even see that's what you're doing?

Win Johnson

Montgomery