Letters to the editor

OPINION:

Speech’s limits

I couldn’t agree more with Phyllis Schlafly’s stand against the proposition that violent video games are free speech (“Violent videos as free speech” Commentary, Wednesday). She inadvertently points out the hypocrisy, in addition, of liberals in general.

Barack Obama, for instance, assumes the position that while he supports Second Amendment rights, he seeks “reasonable restrictions” on the right to own weapons. At the same time, with his voting record being the most liberal in the Senate, he and other liberals in the Senate and in the courts typically see no need for restraints, no matter how “reasonable” they may be, on First Amendment rights to free speech.

JOHN D. S. MUHLENBERG

Vienna, Va.

Abortion intentions

In promoting an elaborate conspiracy theory that the disproportionately high abortion rate of black women demonstrates racism on the part of “the abortion industry” Gerald McDermott and Carol Swain conveniently disregard the fundamental explanation for that rate and misrepresent Guttmacher Institute data in the process (“The Abortion industry,” Op-Ed, March 26).

Black women accounted for 37 percent of abortions performed in the United States in 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available), not a grossly exaggerated 56 percent, as the authors claim. The reason that rate is as high as it is three times that of white women is straightforward. Behind almost every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. A black woman today is three times as likely to have an unintended pregnancy as her white counterpart.

Unfortunately, in both their original column and their subsequent letter (“Abortions and Planned Parenthood,” Tuesday) the authors fail to acknowledge this point or to offer any solutions that would help reduce high rates of unintended pregnancy and thus abortion among black women. Such proven, evidence-based policies include better sex education (not the discredited abstinence-only approach) as well as expanded access to contraceptive services, including through the federal Title X and Medicaid programs.

LAWRENCE B. FINER

Director of domestic research

Guttmacher Institute

New York

Presidential pay

Dan Thomasson’s Commentary column (“Underpaid presidents?” Wednesday) is one side of the proverbial coin of presidential pay in office.

On the other side of the coin, the salary paid to the president may be among the least necessary dollars spent in the entire federal budget.

Why? Presidents would do the job for free, and likely the same people we see now would pursue it. In purely economic terms, salary has no bearing on the motives of people who would seek the job, take the job or do the job.

On the contrary, if they could, some likely would pay the government. Not to mention the fact that a seated president’s payday in post-office life is guaranteed.

The normal rules of compensation, supply and demand have no bearing here.

COL. CHRIS J. KRISINGER

Air Force

Burke

Great Scots!

The article by Tom Gallagher on the Scottish government and First Minister Alex Salmond is very revealing, not about either of these, of course, but about American journalism and priorities (“Scotland’s Huey Long,” Commentary, Monday).

Mr. Gallagher clearly is less interested in respecting facts than in lending support to the United States’ favorite lapdog ally, the British government, in recognition of its loyal support for the questionable war in Iraq.

Contrary to the unsubstantiated assertions in the column, the Scottish National Party promotes a form of civic nationalism aimed at uniting the Scottish people for the purpose of mobilizing their support for independence rather than an ethno-religious one, which could hardly be expected to produce that result.

The Scottish government has nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism or any other religious fundamentalism. Above all, it has nothing to do with the Iranian government, which is, of course, free to represent the views of any government in any way that it may find convenient. The SNP government of Scotland has shown consistently that it supports the U.K. government in opposing terrorism of all kinds. Its support for law and order is impeccable and unimpeachable.

The following quoted paragraph from the column is a complete invention:

“Mr. Salmond party is light on ideas and does not offer a coherent model for Scottish society in which the rights and duties of citizenship are clearly spelled out. There is no desire to reclaim and update the values of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment where a political contract was pioneered for governing society based on freedom of religious affiliation, neutrality of the public space, and the insistence of the superiority of civil laws over religiously-based ones.”

In fact, this is complete nonsense, a statement of the precise reverse of the truth, as one would find if one were to refer to the Scottish National Party’s Web site at www.snp.org.

Mr. Gallagher makes no mention of the fact that although a majority of the electorate of Scotland apparently is in favor of a referendum on independence, the British government is opposed to this, as are all the unionist parties. How can you be silent about such an outrageous denial of democratic rights? Do the Scottish people not deserve to express their will on Scotland’s constitutional future? Is not democracy the American way? If Americans deserved to choose independence, why not Scotland?

As for comparing free-enterprise, democratic Scotland to a now-defunct communist state, words fail me.

Clearly, the struggle for Scottish freedom is not one England’s ally will be disposed to consider favorably. It would appear that there is little to choose between British imperialism and the American variety. In the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, which the U.S. Senate has declared to be one of the inspirations for the American Declaration of Independence, it is declared that “freedom is a noble thing.” That does not refer to the freedom to tell lies.

JACQUES DELAITTRE

Paris

•

Robin Naysmith (“An unfair picture of Scotland,” Letters, yesterday) was simply doing his job as the Scottish government’s representative in the United States by painting a rosy picture of conditions in Scotland. Understandably, he did not dwell on the fact that First Minister Alex Salmond has franchised out relations with the Muslim community to radical Islamists for electoral ends. Osama Saeed, his chief strategist in this regard, supports an Islamic caliphate and in February spoke on the same platform as the British head of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which loudly advocates this goal. Just a few days ago, Mr. Salmond appointed Mr. Saeed to a top parliamentary committee investigating nuclear disarmament. Perhaps Mr. Naysmith could refer me to any other mainstream West European party in which narrow-minded Islamists enjoy such favor.

As for Lynne Whitelaw (Letters, yesterday), when she claims to speak for the whole of Scotland, she paints a sad and rather sinister image of a place where everyone marches to an identical drumbeat. She admits to working for the Scottish Parliament, so her views are perhaps understandable. Nevertheless, they show that my comparison of Alex Salmond with Huey Long, “the Kingfish” is not far off the mark. A reading of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” indicates the kind of suffocating conformity that awaits Scotland if this savvy operator manages to bounce her out of the United Kingdom.

TOM GALLAGHER

National Endowment

for Democracy

Washington