Letters to the Editor
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‘The Good Fight’
Re: “The Good Fight,” Editorial, July 14, 2005. As a Vietnam War veteran who served both on active and reserve duty in the Naval Reserve from 1965 until 1985, I understand that I might be eligible for another medal via The Cold War Medal Act of 2005. For those of us who have served in the Vietnam and Korean wars and the period from 1990-1995, we have been awarded the National Defense Service Medal. In addition, for my service in Vietnam (ostensibly to fight the spread of Cold War communism), I received the Vietnam Service Medal and the Vietnam Campaign Medal. These medals were issued simply for being present there. Many veterans, including myself, have been recognized with unit citations as well as receiving numerous medals for individual accomplishment and heroism.
However, our greatest award is one which cannot be pinned on our chests: We served our nation because we were patriots and wanted to give back something that we received; our right as citizens to live in a democratic and free America. Thus, to be awarded another medal would seem redundant. Yes, there were a number of individuals who served during the Cold War and for all or part of their tours in non-combat zones and might not have received any type of “service medal.” Perhaps they would like to have a “Cold War Medal.”
In lieu of any new medal, please consider using the dollars to be allocated for this cause to pay and subsidize a veterans’ benefit such as an expanded GI Bill to the Americans who are now fighting America’s war on terror.The monies will certainly be better spent on those Americans who now serve on distant hostile shores.
PETER D. SHAY
Cdr., United States Naval Reserve, Ret.
Manhattan
‘Teaching Moment’
Re: “Mr. Bush’s Teaching Moment,” Cal Thomas, Opinion, July 14, 2005. The notion that there is some “judicial mainstream” from which the president should pluck his Supreme Court nominees is somewhat fatuous. What is this “mainstream” to which reference is made? If the mainstream were so apparent, there would be far fewer Americans uncomfortable with a variety of judicial decisions over the past decades. Having said this, I find thoroughly fatuous, and even tendentious, Cal Thomas’s concept of the “Constitution [as] a finished document” – for all time – whose “truth cannot be moderated” and the view that those see it otherwise are no better than “ultimate theological heretics.”
Although he does not in so many words refer to the supposed dichotomy between bad judges, who would “make” the law, and honorable ones, who would merely “interpret” it, that underlies his analysis. He takes no note of the fact that the Constitution is a document employing broad but vague phrases, such as “due process,” “equal protection,” “unreasonable search and seizure,” and “cruel and unusual punishment,” to denote fundamental concepts. He fails to acknowledge that such language is not self-interpreting and does not allow a judge to discern its meaning simply by matching the word against a dictionary definition, especially one frozen in the historical moment of the founding of the republic.
By way of illustration, the decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, out lawing public school segregation, turned on the interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But the words “equal protection” were not self-interpreting as to the legal status of segregation in public schools; not only is it not clear, as a matter of pure language alone, that the operation of separate schools for blacks and whites, if of genuinely equal quality, would be inconsistent with “equal protection,” it is also true that at the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment, which introduced into the Constitution the concept of equal protection, many states, and the District of Columbia, maintained segregated schools.
It was only by acknowledging the modern place of public education, the psychological and social implications of racial segregation, and even the implications of segregation to America’s expanding worldwide presence, that the Court was able to flesh out the contemporary significance of the constitutional imperative of “equal protection” and reach the conclusion that segregated schools could no longer pass constitutional muster.
However, the views of Mr. Thomas and others are likely to prevail in the struggle over the next Supreme Court appointment (or appointments) unless critics of the fallacy of the “make law/interpret law” dichotomy do a better job than they have done so far to educate the public on this critical point, and forego generalized condemnation of the Bush administration for “extremism” in judicial appointments and for departing from a largely illusory “mainstream.”
DAVID B. SIMPSON
Tenafly, N.J.
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