Right on Health Insurance
Your editorial of December 11 about health insurance ["Do Not Resuscitate"] was exactly to the point. The problem with mandating that every citizen of Massachusetts purchase health insurance from private companies if they do not meet economic need criteria as determined by the Commonwealth seems designed to feed the health insurance companies rather than protect and insure the health care needs of the working family. The only way to genuine universal health care, in Massachusetts as well as in the United States, is through a single payer plan. I agree with you that the model should be Social Security and Medicaid. The Obama administration needs to hear from us. Ony the people's lobby can drown out the insurance lobby.
Leslie Nyman
Pelham
Warren a Poor Choice
Obama's taste in ministers is on a par with Bill Clinton's in women: both suffer from a fatal attraction that distracts from the critical issues of the day. The explanation of "inclusiveness" is getting a bit old even this early in the game: there is nothing inclusive about selecting a so-called man of the cloth who compares the sanctity of my marriage to bestiality or incest. Please, Barack, expend the moral capital of issues close to your own heart in this show of bringing everyone into the tent: e.g., why not invite David Duke to bless your inauguration?
It is bad enough that we had to support you knowing you openly opposed gay marriage: we figured that it was the only way you could get elected in homophobic America. We now realize your views on my kind were closer to the religious hypocrisy of the Black Church. And we are told that the Black Church resents our comparison of the struggle for gay rights to that for racial equality. Well, too bad. How quickly people forget who their friends are, and the last oppressed become the first and foremost oppressors. Gay marriage is, plain and simple, a matter of civil rights. Period.
There are some people who simply don't belong in the tent. Leave Rick Warren, the Catholic hierarchy and the Mormon Church Fathers outside. They are all so not entitled to comment on the legitimacy of my marriage, on the 26-year relationship of raising children, tending to aging parents, building a home life, supporting each other through the joys and tragedies of "everyman's" existence, but without, until quite recently, the perks that civil marriage conveys. In a country founded on the principle of separation of church and state, the sight of Obama and McCain making pilgrimage to the religious court of Pastor Warren and kowtowing to kiss his proverbial ring is positively revolting.
Victor Weinblatt
South Hadley
