Traverse City Record-Eagle

Your Views

March 31, 2012

Letters to the editor: 03/31/2012

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Time to protect rights

In a stunning display of their true colors, Republican extremists now dominating the GOP are ever more boldly proving their disdain for trust in a woman's ability or freedom to make decisions about her own body and personal health.

From Speaker of the House John Boehner, to individual states declaring a war on women's rights, to the anti-choice House committee attacking contraceptive coverage, the goal is to control women's bodies and their legal reproductive rights.

While some women are only too happy to give up their personal freedoms, most of us understand that a government that can force you to deliver a baby can also force you to abort one. People who are anti-contraception and also anti-choice are, let's admit it out loud, anti-woman. Can you imagine our government controlling the single most intimate aspect of a man's body?

Why are many people more upset by the Doonesbury cartoons than the actual proposed procedures Texas lawmakers want women to endure? Why does the poster boy of misogyny, Rush Limbaugh, have an audience at all? That he has had one for all these years speaks volumes about our culture.

Women, and men, too, it's time to actively protect your rights.

Donna Miller

Traverse City

Pause to remember

The death of Pierre Schoendoeffer on March 14, 2012, should be noted by us in Traverse City. Mr. Schoendoeffer was a renowned French photographer. His specialty was Vietnam.

In 1954 he parachuted into Dien Bien Phu where he was a French military photographer. Dien Bien Phu was a siege where the French lost to the Viet Minh. Schoendoeffer later photographed American forces fighting in South Vietnam in the 1960s.

His writings were part of the background for what became the 1979 movie "Apocalypse Now." He later was the writer and director of the 1992 French film "Diên Biên Phú." The Vietnamese allowed it to be filmed in Vietnam.

The French Republic honored Mr. Schoendoeffer with a funeral ceremony at Les Invalides. Les Invalides is a combination of the National Cathedral, Smithsonian Museum and former West Point.

Those of us who now live in a world in which there are calls for more war might pause for a moment to remember Mr. Schoendoeffer and the battles and the wars that he filmed and experienced.

Lee Hornberger

Traverse City

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