Winston-Salem Journal LTE SU 02/19/12

The prayer fight

Could the U.S. Supreme Court's summary denial of Forsyth County's cert petition have to do with these very same issues and arguments having been litigated repeatedly, for decades, in jurisdictions all over America, culminating in the same outcome?

Predictably, the losers (no pun intended) profess surprise and dismay and view themselves as righteous victims of malevolent, godless liberals, biased, gullible media and incompetent, activist judges. Like all victims, they deny that they could have done anything wrong, or that their opponents could have anything right. There is nothing they need do but await the day when everyone finally hears them and "gets it." For them, like for all victims, the conflict is the solution.

I sincerely offer them something to ponder: They are right. We aren't listening. We stop listening precisely when we liberals begin to make better arguments for conservatives' own positions than conservatives themselves could make. When we can make more sense out of their positions than they can make, how are they relevant?

Anybody with intellectual honesty knows conservatives are not wrong about everything. Any time you get two smart people thinking, you will get different opinions. But they also know conservatives are in a prolonged funk, indulging militant ignorance and outright bigotry and wallowing in tired, fatuous, ideological drivel.

America needs conservatives to snap out of it and come up with new, genuinely conservative ideas and arguments with intellectual and existential power. Every real liberal out there is pulling for them to do just that. Jesus surely is.

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ANDY G. MILLER

Kernersville

Spiritual students needed

High-school student Joshua Llodrat, who describes himself as a "big-government liberal Democrat," ("Students tackle tough topics in N.C.," Feb. 2), is a reminder that big government is detrimental to our political freedoms. Cuba, Communist Russia and China, as with the Holy Roman Empire and Islamic dictatorships and socialistic nations, demonstrate the authoritarian controls of big/dominating governments. They provide for basic needs of a select group of people and require submission to their leaders. Democracies are not much better, as Henrik Ibsen revealed in his play "An Enemy of the People," and their failures are revealed by partisan politics in our Congress as well as groups walking out of state assemblies because they do not get handouts from government. The answer to people's needs is not "bigger" government of endless executive orders replacing freedom with totalitarian regulations.

We need citizens devoted to the Lord of all, as Martin Luther King contended, and is expressed in our Declaration of Independence, supported by a bill of rights providing basic human freedoms that endorse the commonwealth without requiring religious affiliations. Therefore, citizens must be reared in homes of spiritual devotion with personal accountability and productive behavior in economic affairs. This is lacking in societies where secularism replaces God with government. Government assumes care for selected groups of people, gains their support and manipulates behavior, as secular-minded leaders endorse abortions, sexual promiscuity and favoritism. This history of political control repeats itself where secular liberalism promotes socialized government for sustenance, but fails in preserving human freedom.

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JIM HELVEY

Winston Salem

Sum it up

Do you think Americans are too obsessed with the untimely deaths of celebrities?

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CORRESPONDENT OF THE WEEK

Purse power

I agree totally with your Feb. 1 editorial, "Trees lose out to billboards." That is why I am not going into the politics that caused this farce to be enacted. Your editorial said it all. I hope those who may have missed it will scroll back, read and think. Those who did read it, please chime in.

As my husband and I travel the highways of our beautiful state when the warm weather returns (if we can afford the gas), we will be looking for the chainsaw crews clear-cutting the public-owned trees that block the precious billboard advertising. We used to read: A Hotel 6 at Exit 6 ... 6 miles. A discount at Baloney's, with free drinks with a Bisa card, at Exit 11. Come see our pretty girls who fight in the mud after 12 a.m. with a Bastacard. Exit 12, hurry!

As we travel our roads and highways, I will be jotting down the names of the advertisers on these billboards who are killing our trees, and we will boycott them. Why? Because that is the only way to get the message across. No revenue. Get it?

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PATRICIA STOCKMEISTER

Winston-Salem