Letters - Sunday

THE STRAIGHT STORY

Seger implied tolerance is a one-way street

Linda Seger’s op-ed piece, “Bible an unreliable source for anti-gay Christians,” was a masterpiece of postmodern hermeneutics, moral relativism and distortion of the real issue regarding homosexuality. For any reader interested in what the Bible teaches regarding same-sex intercourse, one need only read Robert A. J. Gagnon’s “The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics.” Even Vanderbilt University’s James Barr admits that Gagnon “establishes that the Bible contains a unanimous witness defining same-sex intercourse as sin.” It’s hard to ignore such scholarship.

However, I want to address Seger’s claim that Christians who are pro-heterosexual are somehow intolerant. Why is it that heterosexuals standing for biblical morality are branded as lacking love and tolerance while homosexuals are somehow portrayed as paragons of virtue, love and tolerance? The European Union parliament is considering tossing Poland out of the EU because it refuses to teach homosexuality in its classrooms. Isn’t the EU intolerant for seeking such action?

What Seger has to seriously address is not “gays” marching in Diversity Days, but whether Colorado Springs public schools should be teaching from the latest homosexual textbook for first-graders, “The King and King,” and why “The King and Queen” is now considered homophobic. That’s the larger issue she leaves unexamined.

David A. Noebel

Summit Ministries

Manitou Springs

Writer’s biblical interpretation missed the mark

Linda Seger started with the premise that homosexuality is OK and sets about proving it by attacking the Bible and Christians. She went about showing all the places God said homosexual behavior is forbidden, then she tried to muddy the waters.

God is nothing if not consistent. He wouldn’t forbid sin and then allow it between David and Jonathan. They were closer than brothers and that’s it. Anything else Seger tried to imply is just sick.

I noticed the column didn’t include an e-mail address or phone number to receive any feedback. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

God loves the sinner and hates the sin.

Michael King

Colorado Springs

ROADS TO PERDITION

Lawmakers are misdirecting transportation dollars

A front-page report in Monday’s Gazette adequately explained the decline of the gas tax as a means of funding our highways but glossed over an important funding alternative that is already in place — if only more lawmakers in Denver would let it do its job (“Gas tax no longer enough to fix our highways”). What’s more, this revenue stream represents precisely the kind of “user pay” that the governor’s blue-ribbon panel on transportation says it is interested in.

A law enacted by the 1997 General Assembly dedicated a significant portion of the sales tax revenue from automobiles and auto parts to transportation projects. By the latest tally, the tax on auto-related sales raises $245 million a year, which is no small potatoes even after the budget writers siphon some of it away to top off the state’s General Fund. The problem is that too many members of both parties in recent years have siphoned off even more. In 2007 alone, they used budget trickery to divert hundreds of millions of dollars away from highways over the next several years to grow other government programs.

That’s why the governor’s transportation panel may wind up reinventing the wheel and spinning it endlessly in the mud as it searches for ever more funding sources, including tax hikes. The real challenge is to protect the funding sources we already have — and any that are identified in the future — from the General Assembly.

Unfortunately, the Legislature cannot be trusted with the public’s highway dollars. If voters are asked to approve any new transportation funding sources, they should demand that those sources, as well as any existing ones, be placed into the state’s constitution where politicians cannot lay a hand on them.

Andy McElhany

State senator, District 12

Colorado Springs

APPLES AND ORANGES

City salaries should be tied to average local wages

I want to congratulate The Gazette for its exposé of the gravy train at Colorado Springs Utilities (“The icing on the check,” August 12).

Back on July 17 The Gazette published an article about traffic monitoring in which a police officer, in addition to his $91,000-year regular job, took on another, monitoring the cameras in the traffic control center, at a salary of $76,000 a year. Then, the other day, there was a report about anticipated salary and benefits increases for all city employees. The basis for the increases is a typical salary escalator that surveys salaries in other Front Range communities and comparable sized cities in the U.S.

Rather than use such an escalator, which is always biased to the upside, city employee salaries should be tied to the average or median salaries prevailing in the community. For Colorado Springs, the median income for a family of four is roughly $65,000 per year. If both parents are working, as is usually the case, that suggests that private sector salaries are much lower than those of city staff. it’s time for a reality check.

Tom Savage

Colorado Springs

IN RESPONSE

State didn’t ‘cave in’ on college admission standards

The Gazette’s August 16 Our View about the action by the Commission on Higher Education on the 2008 Higher Education Admissions Requirements gave the erroneous impression that the commission “caved in” regarding college preparedness standards (“Beating a retreat”).

The commission fully understands the importance of admitting students to college who are prepared to do college work. The commissioners chose to allow another measure of preparedness — the so-called index score, a combination of ACT scores and high school GPA — as an alternative to completion of the prescribed pre-collegiate curriculum for 2008 graduates. This index score has been validated by research as a reliable predictor of college performance — and avoidance of need for costly remediation. So, in allowing Colorado institutions to admit students whose index scores are 10 points higher than the usual threshold score for admission, the commission chose an alternative standard that is probably more rigorous than the 2008 high school curriculum.

In any case, there was no backing off the need to reduce remediation and ensure college readiness. The authority of institutions to admit 20 percent of students through a so-called window exemption already existed in statute. It recognizes, among other realities, that many high school students decide late that they want to go to college and may not have prepared as fully as they should. For some of them, The Gazette was correct to say that community college is the right alternative. But many simply would not continue their education if they couldn’t go to a four-year college.

We believe it is preferable to permit colleges to use discretion about admitting some of these students whom they judge can do college work. These are students who would otherwise be relegated to getting by in an ever more competitive economy without the education they need and society needs them to have. Given that the state evaluates colleges, in part, on their graduation rates, there is a check against a permissive approach to admission.

David E. Skaggs

Executive director

Colorado Department of Higher Education

Denver