Letters to the Editor

May 4, 2004

Scouts praised for rescue, ACLU rapped for suits

Regarding "Rescue at sea / Local Scouts find lost diver after their sailing ship is almost rammed" (News, April 29):

Wouldn't it have been ironic had Dan Carlock been a card-carrying ACLU member?

Nah, he was praying to God for help and look whom God sent.

Think of the people whom the Scouts might someday have helped in Balboa Park after spending all that money to make it nice for all people to enjoy.

JEAN KIDWELL
San Diego

So the mighty ACLU, with the help of a behemoth law firm, Morrison & Foerster, is able to convince a federal district judge that the Boy Scouts are a religious organization and that the city cannot lease property to them on the same terms as other nonprofit groups.

This appallingly erroneous decision, so glaring as to attract the attention of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, whose "friend of the court" brief Judge Napoleon Jones refused to accept for filing, is news. But the headline should have been "Local judge rules for the first time in American history that belief in God disqualifies a nonprofit organization from being treated equally by city government."

Jones' novel interpretation of the First Amendment turns the "freedom of religion" into "freedom from religion" and then some – more like "freedom to discriminate against those who profess religious beliefs."

The Orwellian quote from ACLU attorney Jordan Budd, indicating that the ACLU would let the Boy Scouts stay on Fiesta Island and in Balboa Park if they simply renounced their religious beliefs and accepted homosexuals as adult leaders, sounds like a schoolyard bully demanding lunch money from a defenseless victim. Except that instead of simply trying to extort money, the ACLU is seeking to coerce a venerable organization into abandoning its constitutional rights.

MARK PULLIAM
San Diego