Letters to the editor

Virginia, homosexuals and adoption

I read with interest your article “Virginia to issue new birth certificates” (Page 1, Saturday). It sounds from your article as though if a homosexual couple adopts a child, Virginia must now issue a new birth certificate listing the homosexual couple as the birth parents.

I was amazed at the article and feel not enough information was included to explain the purpose of the original lawsuit and the thinking behind the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling, because it would be obvious that two males or two females could not be biological birth parents.

I would imagine, especially with what we have learned about genomes and their seriousness in medically treating or preventing illnesses, that birth certificates should be issued once and only once, with the biological parents listed as parents. This enables any child to search his or her medical background, helping the child or adoptive parents see what illnesses, abnormalities, etc., have come up in the family history and so enable corrective action.

Where it gets complicated is in the case of surrogate mothers helping out couples in which the one parent is unable to conceive and/or carry a child. Solving that one is way above my pay grade.

However, when a child is adopted and the birth parents do not want their identities known, I understand that there still is only the one birth certificate; it just doesn’t get passed along to the adoptive parents with the rest of the paperwork.

The term “birth certificate” means just that, a listing of birth information — including names, if known, of those individuals who conceived the child — and it should not have anything to do with who ultimately raises the child. This does not seem to me to be a “homosexual” or “straight” issue, but a protective step for the child.

Adoption papers would seem to me to cover whatever adoptions occur, whether by homosexual or straight parents.

MARTHA HULLINGER

Fairfax

Safety problems at Yucca Mountain

Joshua Gilder’s Friday Op-Ed column, “The Yucca Mountain scandal,” is, in itself, scandalous in how it plays fast and loose with the facts. The fact that government scientists not only would falsify important data that bears directly on the ability of the Yucca Mountain, Nev., site to safely isolate deadly radioactive waste from people and the environment is bad enough. That they openly flaunt it and treat such actions as almost routine is truly scary.

What the e-mails in question demonstrate is not just that computer models and the veracity of certain data have been compromised. Taken together, those e-mails show the pressure the scientists were — and continue to be — under to make Yucca Mountain work regardless of the fundamental and fatal problems that plague the site.

Mr. Gilder refers to what he calls “the almost ideal conditions of the Nevada desert” for storing nuclear waste. This has a nice ring to it for those who want to rationalize building a facility that is patently unsafe. In fact, the Yucca site is highly fractured; water moves through it very rapidly; the subsurface environment is highly corrosive, meaning that waste containers won’t last long there; and without man-made containers to keep the radioactive waste out of the tunnels for 10,000 years or more, radionuclides move very quickly into the aquifer below and into the biosphere. That is not what a geologic repository is supposed to do.

Mr. Gilder also asserts that waste at Yucca will be “vitrified into solid glass.” That is patently wrong. The spent fuel will not be vitrified, but rather stored just as it is now — as compacted, irradiated pellets inside metallic fuel elements that are extremely vulnerable to corrosion and dilution when contacted with water.

It is no coincidence that water and water movement is at the heart of the e-mail scandal. The Department of Energy realized in the mid-1990s (the same time frame as the e-mails acknowledging data fabrication) that Yucca Mountain would have to be disqualified under DOE’s own site-screening guidelines because of the existence of very rapid groundwater movement through the site.

To avoid the inevitable, the scientists in question, under pressure and threats to their budgets, appear to have falsified data and fudged models to make the site appear suitable when it wasn’t. That’s not just a tempest in a teapot. That’s big-time scientific fraud.

And talk about misrepresentation: When Mr. Gilder asserts that the real danger with spent fuel is continuing to store it at nuclear power plants around the country — probably the most secure commercial installations in the country, I might add — he conveniently omits any reference to the very real and much more significant risks of unnecessarily putting tens of thousands of shipments of deadly radioactive waste on the nation’s highways and railroads, where they would become attractive targets for terrorists and other troublemakers.

If bald-faced scientific fraud involving the fundamental issue of the ability of a repository site to safely isolate some of the most deadly and long-lived materials humans have created isn’t a “major revelation” warranting a rethinking of the entire Yucca Mountain project, I don’t know what is.

JOSEPH C. STROLIN

Administrator

Planning Division

Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects

Office of the Governor

Carson City

Teaching children manners

I normally find Kate Tsubata’s Homeschooling Today columns right on the mark, and I generally agreed with Monday’s column, “Unplugged times attune all to learning.”

However, I was somewhat surprised by one of her comments: “Even if I am speaking, if someone else says something, I stop and listen, not just for courtesy, but also because I decided I wanted to hear what each person is saying.”

I hope she is not saying that it’s OK for a child (or adult) to interrupt when someone is talking. Yes, it is important to listen to our children when they are speaking, but it is just as important to teach children that interrupting someone else is not acceptable behavior. Children should learn both how to listen and when to speak.

SARAH HAMAKER

Fairfax

Maryland’s slots bill

Gov. Robert Ehrlich has worked very hard over the past three years for one of his core priorities, allowing slots in Maryland’s horse-racing parks. The governor rightly championed slots as a way to fully fund education and save the state’s horse-racing industry. (I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that the General Assembly passed the Thornton bill, which would increase state funding for education with the intent of equalizing spending for poorer districts, but hasn’t appropriated money to pay for it.)

People are gambling. It is evident in our lotteries, games of chance and the Super Bowl. Mr. Ehrlich wisely figures that if people are going to gamble, why not gamble in Maryland? I don’t want to keep driving out of state to spend my money.

Yet the Democratic leadership in the House of Delegates would rather let the state bleed money than allow the governor to deliver what the people want. We cannot support disingenuous politicians such as Michael Busch, who refuses to negotiate on slots.

The people should not be thwarted by arrogant politicians.

AL EISNER

Wheaton

CLARIFICATION: Due to an editing error by the Copy Desk, a letter to the editor in Friday’s editions (“The sex-education war continues”) misstated the implications of a proposal that would allow states to use federal abstinence-only funds for other sex-education programs. The pertinent paragraph in the letter from James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, should have read: “I read with disbelief Robert Rector’s [April 19] column on comprehensive sex education and upcoming legislation by Sen. Max Baucus. I thought the column should have come with the disclaimer: ’Any connection between diatribe and the reality of young people’s lives is purely coincidental.’ ”