Letters to the Editor: May 13, 2022

It's outta here: Minor league baseball is becoming too expensive

Minor league baseball just got more expensive. Parking used to be free, now $5. Decide last minute to go to a game, $2 surcharge for buying your ticket at the ticket office. I can understand the increase in ticket price for a game, but $5 parking and $2 surcharge for day-of-play ticket purchase? A senior $8 ticket now costs you $15.

Explanation given: Major League Baseball by contract has to pay for minor league housing expense. Take it out on the small guy while paying minimum of $4 million to major league players and upwards of $25 million a year to the top 10% of the players.

Maybe the fans should be the ones negotiating the contracts since we are the ones footing the bills.

Dana Bennett, Port St. Lucie

Items for disposal left alongside the road for a long while are an eyesore

I am writing this letter as a concerned citizen of the Mars Hill Community in Jensen Beach. We strive to keep out homes and yards maintained with the best of care. As you drive through our neighborhood on Savannah Road to County Line Road, there is a mixture of old and new homes but the drive through is often times very upsetting because of the yard debris, furniture and other items that some homeowners along Barbara Drive and Hy-Line Drive discard over their privacy fences to sit for months on end until Waste Management comes to pick it up. I have sent emails to my district one representative at the county commission expressing my concerns to what seems to be no avail.

These items are an eyesore not only to the residents of the community but to the numerous drivers who use Savannah Road on a daily basis as a cut through to access Indian River Drive. Also, the debris is a safety hazard as it sits on the easement and this two-lane road is narrow and often times there are bike riders, walkers and speeders that sometimes veer off the road or even over into the next lane.

As homeowners we are asked by Waste Management to have our yard debris out front of our homes on the designated pick-up days and to call and schedule pick up for debris that requires a bigger truck.

Why are these homeowners allowed to simply disregard the rules when it comes to disposing of their waste materials?

Andrea Dixon, Jensen Beach

Restrictions on abortion have adverse and unwelcome consequences

It's tragic and hypocritical that abortion restrictions are being enacted by mostly old, wealthy, white men in Congress and state legislatures. They are ignoring the consequences: more deaths of women in childbirth, more babies up for adoption, more children with a poor future, more babies and youths to overwhelm our adoption and foster-care systems.

The main reason women, especially poor women of all colors, seek abortions is poverty. They know they will not be able to care for, nurture and educate the babies born in their impoverished circumstances. It is not because they are "selfish" or self-centered. On the contrary, they are doing a service to us all by not bringing millions of children into this world who will be a burden to society.

Until we address the issue of poverty, such as with a basic annual income, affordable housing and heath care, women will justly seek abortions for fetuses they cannot raise safely. The pro- and anti-abortion forces seem to care little about helping poor mothers and disadvantaged children during and after birth.

Restrictions on abortions, including abortions in rape, incest or to save the mothers' lives, are inhumane and uncivilized. We should ask ourselves, what kind of men rape and do incest? The criminal and the mentally ill. What does that do to the nation's gene pool? More children with mental illness and deformities and more women dying in childbirth. More homelessness. These laws ignore the adverse consequences of abortion restrictions.

Morally, we have to care as much about the lives of teenage girls and poor and fragile women as we do about the unborn. The new laws relegate women to second-class citizenship, like the "Jim Crow laws" of our woeful past.

This should activate all Americans to vote out these legislative cretins.

Robert A. Gibbons, Stuart

The U.S. Constitution was written to give rights to privileged white men

Justice Samuel Alito, in his leaked draft opinion, wrote that the word “abortion” isn't mentioned in the Constitution. He's right. But the Constitution wasn't written to give rights to women, it was written to give rights to privileged white men. The original Constitution did not give women the right to vote either. Do we really want to go back to those dark days?

John Buckley, Port St Lucie

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Letters to the Editor: May 13, 2022