A word to the misinformed

The real danger is in today’s world is when people twist and distort an issue to suit their misinformed argument, playing pawns with the lives of innocent people while attempting to legislate morality. But heck, our government does it every day without any qualms, so why not, right?

I was angered and shocked to read Wednesday’s Letter to the Editor, “Who’s the Real Hypocrite?” which argued for the death penalty, argued against abortion and pretty much justified the possible deaths of children in a US led war in Iraq.

I would like to point out some serious flaws in the author’s logic.

The author argued against abortion, saying that it “ends children’s lives that have barely begun.” However, when referring to the issue of casualties in Iraq during the war, he said that the death of Iraqi children was certain, but it’s okay since thousands of them die anyway because of economic sanctions.

The war, which will kill innocent children in the attempt to remove Saddam Hussein, will result in likely “easing” of the sanctions. And since these sanctions are responsible for many thousands of deaths, a few young lives lost here and there in the process won’t make that much more difference.

Talk about hypocrisy. For someone to equate the issues of abortion with deaths of children due to sanctions is to make for a skewed argument. These are two essentially different issues in their nature.

Second, for someone to argue that abortion is wrong because it ends the lives of children while not even attempting to condemn the deaths of children in a war and the deaths of children because of sanctions is more than disturbing. When this argument is made, it has the same effect of trading a life for a life and of justifying death, which does anything but support the author’s argument against abortion.

Also, let us remember who placed the sanctions in Iraq anyway – the United States. Let us open our eyes and look at the real picture: These sanctions deliberately jeopardize the right to not only food, but to health care as well and in turn jeopardizes the lives of innocent civilians in an attempt to oust Saddam. How a person, let alone a nation, can justify this as a means to an end is unbelievable and atrocious.

Oh. But wait – former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did do just that. Albright has said that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions was a “price” well “worth it.”

Perhaps Ed Board was a tad bit correct when it said that Bush was hypocritical in his policy. After all, it was Bush who said “respect for the right to life calls us to value and to protect the lives of innocent children” who are “waiting to be born.”

I might be smoking, but it sounds like Bush is not quite applying that same principle to the children of Iraq. It’s funny how the very same man who admires “devotion to the cause of life” is also overly eager to wage war.

By the way, the death penalty has never been and will never be administered properly, and will always be administered to a disproportionately high number of people from low socio-economic status and always contain the risk of being administered to innocent people. That is no price for justice worth paying, since the death penalty is not even an effective deterrence device.