Letters for July 13, 2017

Totaling the bill

I am strongly opposed to the Republican health care bill. It is nothing more than a tax break for the wealthy while killing off thousands of poor and elderly people.

Those of us with pre-existing conditions don’t have a prayer. Under what I call Trumpdoesn’tcare, I will be dead within six to 12 months, depending on how long I can go without meds and a physician’s care. The premium I pay now is about $250.00 a month. Any more and I would not have any insurance. Medicare takes over a hundred and part “D” almost $50. All this out of about $700 a month in Social Security.

As a Carson City resident and constituent, Senator Heller, I ask you to please vote no on this horrible bill.

C. D. McDonnell

Carson City

How will it be used?

Re “Cegavske threatens privacy” (editorial, July 6):

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske should have more information before sending our voter information to D.C. How will the data be used to determine who did or who didn’t vote illegally? What will the commission do with the data? Compare names given by secretaries of state to a list of known undocumented people? Then what?

I’m sure they’ll find a number of Jesus and Mohammad legally registered citizens eligible to vote with similar names of the undocumented. What then? How will the commission determine if it was the legally registered who voted or undocumented using the same name? I didn’t see any cameras at my voting place. Even “Donald Trump” has been recorded as voting at least twice. But he’ll claim he voted once and Donald, Jr., voted the second time. Where’s his proof? Maybe he has proof for this past election but what proof for previous elections?

Instead of taking the information to D.C., Trump should fund the secretaries of state to do investigation in their own states and report back to the commission. This way the information does not leave the state, which is currently secure, nor will the information be subject to a political witch hunt and manipulated by political hacks to prove their boss is correct. I tend to trust our Washoe Register of Voters office over a politically motivated/appointed commission tasked with an agenda.

Dewey Quong

Reno

Debating infanticide

Re “One Christian’s response” (letters, July 6):

In response to Katriel J. Van Cleve’s defense of her Creator killing many thousands of Egyptian firstborn male children, she asserts, “God was grieved to take children, but we all must admit it was just,” I vehemently disagree and make no admission that it was “just.” There is no offense so great that just and fitting punishment for the offender is to kill their living, breathing child. That’s immoral, as nearly any atheist will tell you.

The notion that everyone who felt the misery of losing one of those precious children deserved to feel that misery is insane, but if that’s not true, it means that many innocent people were punished through their grief. Did all the children in every family across Egypt really deserve the misery and grief they felt when their brother died? Try telling a 6-year old girl that “we all must admit it was just” that the happy and healthy brother she adores was killed by God, because the Pharaoh she never met made a decision that she would never have made. Do you think that she would ever grow to love and worship the God who so cruelly hurt her as a child? The twin concepts of “group guilt” and “group punishment” hang like an albatross around the neck of modern-day Christianity, inherited from Old Testament origins but completely at odds with frequent attempts to portray this Judeo-Christian God as fair and just.

Killing children because of Pharaoh’s intransigent refusal to let the Israelites leave Egypt was arguably the pinnacle of cruelty, no matter how wrong Pharaoh’s decision, and absolutely nothing can justify it. Christians are often quick to point out the evil they see in the world, yet rarely recognize or acknowledge it when it stares out at them from the pages of their own Bibles. Maybe Bibles are more for thumping than for reading.

Gary Marks

Reno