How ‘Christian’ was it for TCU fans to boo injured West Virginia football players? | Opinion
Talk about unsportsmanlike
At the TCU-West Virginia football game Sept. 30, I observed a couple of distressing displays of poor sportsmanship on the part of our Horned Frog hosts. Two times late in the game, many fans in purple booed Mountaineer injuries on the field, including one where a stretcher and air cast were needed to treat the athlete.
It felt a little surreal seeing people wearing Texas Christian University gear behaving so unlike Christ. Jeering an innocent kid dehumanized him and yourselves.
- Stacy Swecker, Fort Worth
Deserved much bigger play
Americans were killed and kidnapped by terrorists in Israel, and it didn’t even make the Star-Telegram’s Oct. 10 front page. It was on Page 5A. (“Israel strikes and seals off Gaza after incursion by Hamas”)
What you thought was relevant on the first four pages that day were Fort Worth Independent School District’s early learning plans, teacher raises, a criminal conviction, car crashes and the best doughnuts in Fort Worth.
Where are your priorities? Women and children are being slaughtered. Isn’t that more important than doughnuts?
- Donna Bierd, Keller
Killing civilians always wrong
Although I do not defend Hamas’ attacks on Israel, they are a direct result of the actions of Israel’s far-right government. As an editorial in Haaretz explained, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of the Palestinians.”
The United States had better think twice about giving Israel aid and weapons to invade Gaza to exact revenge. Three million Palestinians are packed onto that tiny strip. It’s been described as the largest open-air prison in the world. Most people there are civilians and do not deserve to be killed.
Collective punishment is always a war crime, and killing civilians is wrong — whether it’s done by Hamas or by Israel.
- Ken Pardue, Fort Worth
What does peace require?
If only it were easier to sit down at a peace table than to start a war.
If only it were easier to compromise with other human beings than to kill them.
If only it were harder to exact revenge than to embrace the future.
“Peace will come,” former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, when our enemies “love their children more than they hate us.”
- Barbara Chiarello, Austin
Protect poor from payday loans
The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case that will decide whether the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is constitutional. The bureau is currently funded through the Federal Reserve. It does not go through the appropriations process in Congress. Other similarly funded programs include Medicare, federal bank deposit insurance and Social Security.
Texas payday and title loan businesses are at the center of this lawsuit. These businesses charge outrageous interest on short-term loans. Texas leaders have failed to rein in their abusive practices, so the federal agency is key.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau not only provides critical consumer protections in many areas of personal finance, but it also enforces rules against discrimination in lending and to protect vulnerable groups such as service members, veterans and older Americans. It’s an important agency for Texans.
- Kathryn Arnold, Fort Worth
Editor’s note: The author is CEO of Pathfinders, a Tarrant County nonprofit organization that aims to eliminate poverty.
