Letters to the Editor: SCOTUS, gun control, and the plight of national forests

Never learning from mistakes

It seems like ages ago.

Gas prices and rationing were the gripes of the day. Even and odd numbered license plates were given days to buy gas because our Saudi friends in OPEC decided to cut way back on production. President Carter responded by putting lots of funding into alternative energy sources. Wind and solar investment grew. There were even solar panels on the White House.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected. He then made Anne McGill Gorsuch-Burford the head of the EPA. She immediately took off the solar panels, cut alternative energy investment and put business executives in charge of monitoring their own industries for environmental concerns. When she held back $1.6 billion in Superfund money approved by Congress for California in order to help elect a Republican there, she resigned in disgrace to avoid prosecution.

Surprise, her son Neil is now on the Supreme Court curbing the EPA and climate change prevention. I guess we never learn from our mistakes.

Hal Huestis, Eugene

Devoid of virtue

The very thought that we could be confronted with a lie that imperils the foundational essence of our country, namely democracy, is profoundly ludicrous and disastrous.

To submit to the Big Lie, one must be willing to throw Honest Abe under the bus, kick George Washington to the curb and besmirch the dignity of all the patriots who gave their last measure to secure the integrity of the USA.

I implore my fellow citizens to honestly ask: Is the person who would throw his sycophantic vice president to a lynch mob while inducing armed insurrectionists to usurp the legislative process worthy of anything but scorn?

So the question is: Is Donald Trump the pillar of admiration and leadership you champion or not? The content of his character is devoid of virtue, integrity or any socially redeeming quality.

Leslie Marti, Eugene

National forests should not be ‘resource colonies’

In 1991 I resigned from the Forest Service after I became a whistleblower.

Ever since I have worked nearly full time with many environmental organizations to reform the Forest Service and Oregon BLM. After 30 years, both agencies in most respects have become more corrupt than they were in the 1990s. Back then they could claim ignorance of the damage they were inflicting and deny climate upheaval. That is no longer the case.

Both agencies continue to propose and implement huge, many thousand-acre timber sales, industrial recreation projects for off-road vehicles and soon electric “motor” cycles will be overtaking every trail, all this regardless of the ecological and climate impacts.

The Willamette National Forest has many proposed “logging” projects using loopholes to avoid thorough environmental analysis and Eugene BLM has proposed a logging plan to extract about 350 million board feet (70,000-plus loads) over the next several years. Our national forests and BLM lands must be managed together as essential life support systems for human survival, not forever degraded resource colonies and motorized theme parks. Shannon Wilson, Eugene

Keep combat weapons in combat situations

To President Biden and Congress: You'd better keep the flags at half-staff indefinitely.

Until you do something to remove AR-15s and other combat-style weapons from American cities and states, we will continue to bury our family members, friends and neighbors who die in mass shootings. The bipartisan Safer Communities Act is an excellent law that will save lives, but to significantly curtail mass shootings we must get weapons of war off our streets.

Many opponents to these types of measures cite mental illness, not dangerous guns, as the reason for mass shootings. This reasoning is a fallacy. Other nations have mentally ill people in their populations, but they do not suffer mass shootings on a scale even remotely comparable to the United States. Why? Because in those countries combat weapons are not readily available.

The Second Amendment was not meant to coddle madmen. Other types of guns can be purchased legally. No one, except a soldier during wartime, needs a combat rifle.

Bobbie Cirel, Eugene

Soul searching

Ever since The Register-Guard drastically cut its opinion pages, I have been slowly losing my gruntle over the fact that it uses so much of its limited page space by trotting out two Don Kahle columns a week.

I can overlook the harmless fripperies, but I have to strongly object to his column published on July 6 ("Will humans be a match for Google AI?").

I don’t know of anyone — who believes in souls — who is “comfortable believing that an evil leader or a dementia patient or a mindless bureaucrat lacks a soul,” according to Kahle. A dementia patient! That is a slap in the face of anyone with dementia and anyone who cares for them, not to mention some hard-working bureaucrats.

The practice of assigning souls to various entities is a direct threat to our non-sectarian democratic republic. There is a group of people who believe that embryos and fetuses have souls and they have been successful, with the help of the SCOTGOP (the Supreme Court of the GOP) in establishing their religious views as the law of the land in direct violation of the anti-establishment clause of the Constitution.

Where is Molly Ivins, the long-time columnist and humorist, when we need her?

Steven C. Hiatt, Eugene

The Opinion Page runs Sundays and Wednesdays in The Register-Guard.

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: SCOTUS, gun control, and the plight of national forests