To the editor,

Last week I wrote elaborating why nothing former President Donald Trump says or does can be trusted because he is a serial liar. He’s proved it again with this wildly false racist rant about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ill. eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors when they haven’t, claiming they are illegal immigrants when they are not. 

City officials including the Republican Mayor and the Republican Governor of Ohio have gone on public record saying that the repeating of this lie has got to stop because it has unleashed hateful harassment and ugly anonymous threats against the Haitian community as well as bomb threats against city and school district buildings. Days of school and a city-wide festival have been cancelled.  The Proud Boys have marched through the city and another Ku Klux Klan affiliated group left fliers around town that said, among other things, that the Haitian immigrants were, “disease-ridden and filthy.” This is what we can look forward to more of if Donald Trump is elected again.

That being said, I do not want to give the impression I support everything Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats stand for. Let’s talk about abortion. Both sides, Democrat and Republican, use this issue as a hammer with which to club the other side instead of coming together to solve problems. Many Republican office holders and seekers take the position of being pro-life, but then in numerous state legislatures, bills have been passed and signed into law by Republican Governors with language that is vague instead of being well defined to make sure there is no question that when life threatening conditions affect the pregnant woman (like pulmonary hypertension, ectopic pregnancy, severe pre-eclampsia, severe kidney disease and cancer) that physicians can give appropriate treatment without fear of arrest. Such language could be taken right from the document entitled “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which says in its Directive #45, “Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted.”; but which also says in its Directive #47, “Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child.” 

Then there are pro-choice Democrats in office or seeking such, like Vice President Kamala Harris who have said repeatedly that they want to pass a national law restoring Roe vs. Wade, justifying this by saying that everyone should be free to make decisions about one’s own body without government interference (something even Roe vs. Wade, if one actually reads it, didn’t support). This definition of freedom isn’t about freedom, it’s about license to do anything with one’s body, even that which is patently wrong. Such an argument/slogan makes it tough to argue that its appropriate to have everyone be subject to TSA searches at the airport which have prevented many terrorist plots; nor would it allow for a military draft, should it be necessary to fight a major war threatening our freedom and/or that of others around the world; neither would it allow arrests for drunken drivers because what one does with their body is their own business, right? This crazy “hands off my body” argument has been used to justify abortion of perfectly healthy babies at any time during a pregnancy for any reason, never mind ignoring that another body, however small, grows in the womb. How is it that the party which rightly stands up for the poor, the oppressed, the immigrant and victims of discrimination can’t/won’t put a greater emphasis on helping women who would like to keep their pregnancies but fear domestic partners and poverty and can’t/won’t support women with unwanted pregnancies to carry them to term while promoting the recruitment of families for adoption? If we can put people on the moon, why is this so hard?

Steven L. Carlson

Plum City