Has Issues with Publisher’s Wife’s Column

To The Editor:
I wonder what life would be like in this marvelous country if we could put aside the vitriolic slander of the leader of the free world and perhaps look beyond our hatred and attitudes to somehow see the man and what he has done for this country in these difficult times.
No personal disrespect for Patricia Hall, but her article entitled “Religious Liberty 2012,” Feb. 29 is on so many levels that I couldn’t help but write this letter. Hall begins her comments, focusing on the fact that “his (President Obama) very choice of titles for his appointed Czars is enough to make me worried.” She goes to on to say, “why would anybody choose the ancient title of the Russian monarchy that was famously unresponsive to its subject?”
Why indeed? The earliest known use of the term for a U.S. government official was in the administration of FDR 1933-1945. The term was revived to describe officials in the Nixon and Ford administrations and continues today. Number of czar titles, FDR, 11; LBJ, 3; Reagan, 1; GHW Bush, 2; Clinton, 8; GW Bush, 33 and Obama, 38.
The comments then focus on the administration trying to force the Catholic Church and its affiliates to make free contraceptives available as part of their insurance coverage for employees. It was never the Catholic Church that was asked to supply health care for its employees, but rather its affiliates and that has now been adjusted because our president listens to the American people. This topic has been debated ad nauseam by the Republican primary candidates who are suffering in the polls due to their blatant disregard for women’s health coverage.
Finally, Hall uses a famous quotation to emphasize her reasons of why the people should speak up to be heard before our rights are taken away. She in fact is comparing the current administration to the Nazi regime in Germany. The quotation is a famous statement attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group of group.
“First they came for the communist, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
I’m so sick and tired of hearing comparisons in one or another to the Holocaust. How vile to even bring up what happened in Europe over 60 years to anything that this president and his administration is accomplishing with or without the support of all the people.
Hall quotes Rick Warren who says “I’d go to jail rather than cave in to a government mandate that violates what God commands us to do.”
So by this statement and with agreement from Hall, because she included it in her opinion column, God has commanded personally that we not support the policies of this administration?
The right wing members of this country are so blinded with disrespect that they cannot see beyond their hate and they call themselves good Christians. I think not.
MICKI GOLDBERG
Swainton