LETTERS

This letter writer has obviously never visited a trailer court in Henderson:

Don't be in hell when you realize it's real. Pray to God today.

Editor's note:
What could have prompted this? Our March 4 essay on gay marriage? Last week's story about Elton John, who, rumor has it, isn't chaste? The devilishly fun illustration on the cover of the March 18 issue? We just don't know!

Lonn Friend's story last week about a chance encounter with Elton John netted him this response from an old acquaintance:

Loved the Elton John story. Did I ever tell you that he changed my life? I was 11 or 12 when "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road" came out. Living a sheltered, religious life. The good girl. Very good girl. We're all in my parents room just before bedtime when I hear music coming from my older brother's radio. I stop what I'm doing and follow the music, hypnotized, to his room, staring at the grate on the old AM-FM radio. I hear the swelling chorus erupting around me.

Slack-jawed, I ask my brother, "Who is this?" He says "Elton John." I think, "That's a strange name. Sounds like a toilet." I say, "Is this rock 'n' roll?" He says yes. I gape at the box, letting the music wash over me. I like rock 'n' roll. The music that my parents spoke of in such condescending ways. I like it. "They're all drug addicts. Feh," my mother would say in disgust. A drug addict couldn't make music like this. Could he? I was devoted from that moment on.

I shared this story with Axl Rose one day, at least a decade and a half ago. He was amazed that we had such similar affection for Elton, as Mr. John helped shape his life via his music in the very same way.

I'm glad you found the guts to talk to him. And I'm glad he was gracious and witty and verbose. Wish I was there ...

Why are we paying Republican strategists like Rich Galen (whose son works for Bush's election campaign) and other Republican Party operatives to run the press office in Baghdad? Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office that includes a large number of Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers. Their sole purpose is to only present the positive side of the Bush administration's invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and insurgents continue to attack Americans to force them to leave.

Associated Press reported that politicking and trumpeting U.S. accomplishments in Iraq to help reelect Bush angers many coalition officials. The press office, operating out of a Saddam palace, sends strategically timed, targeted "good news" releases to American media outlets and ignores or plays down any bad news. The occupation must be in serious trouble to install such a team.

The public is entitled to see the true picture, not a rosy, make-believe world, manufactured to help Bush's election chances at the cost of people's lives.

President Bush and other conservatives have been accused in recent weeks of seeking to "put bias in the Constitution" by endorsing an amendment that would define marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is, the Constitution is going to be altered one way or the other. Either that change will come from unelected, unaccountable judges intent on creating a right of homosexual couples to marry when the Constitution grants no such right; or it will come from the American people through this amendment to preserve marriage as it has served society for millennia.

Amendment opponents have also turned to an emotional argument in asking, "How does one couple's gay marriage threaten anyone's heterosexual marriage?" This question misses the point: The goal of gay activists isn't the individual relationship of any two people, despite such statements. It is the revision of national policy to say that gender, especially in child-rearing, is inconsequential, even though research indicates children do best when raised by a married mother and father.

This aggressive campaign to undermine marriage as it's always been known can be defeated—but only if we all stand up to support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Editor's note:
And the goal of anti-gay-marriage activists, despite statements to the contrary, has little to do with the welfare of children or the maintenance of a tradition that's "served society for millennia." It's about concretizing into law their disgust over behavior that's none of their damn business but which they can't stop obsessing about.

Thanks to the Web, even people in Georgia can read our fine movie reviews:

I live in Atlanta, and I read a part of your review (of Me and the Prince) on rottentomatoes.com, and I just wanted to say I think it was GREAT that you said any woman who isn't interested in marriage has to be engaged by the end of the film. Good call, you! Excellent job.