If you’re so ‘pro-life,’ why do you continue to tolerate Texas’ broken foster system?
Foster kids come in last place
So many people and politicians spend so much time, energy and money trying to take away a woman’s right to decide if an abortion is the smartest decision for an unplanned pregnancy. But once these children are born, everyone forgets about them.
The foster care system in Texas is an absolute failure. If parents treated their children the same as the foster system, their children would be removed from their homes. Everyone who is so opposed to abortion should have to register to take in a child who was born but not wanted or was abused.
I wish pro-life people would take the time to check out the unacceptable state of the foster system and see what they could do to make this situation better.
- Sandra Seyffert, Fort Worth
The oil question to be asked
As a petroleum engineer from Texas A&M University, I find that moderate and left-wing news people are not asking the right questions about energy. I encourage them to ask a simple question to every oil executive and right-wing talking head on television who says that President Joe Biden and the Democrats need to forget about global warming and remove regulations on drilling for oil in the United States: “Do you promise to keep all the American crude oil you produce in the United States?”
They will start making like a crawfish and sputter about the word “fungible,” but I assure you that they will not promise to keep our crude oil here. They will happily continue shipping it overseas.
- Mark K. Bauer, Haslet
Biden is the real discriminator
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included provisions forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting or firing.
But President Joe Biden declared before the 2020 presidential election that he would choose a Black woman as his running mate and that he would nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
What about prioritizing things actually relevant to the positions, like who is best qualified? Didn’t Biden violate the Civil Rights Act in his “pre-deciding” the race and sex of his choices? If he somehow didn’t legally violate it, he certainly violated the spirit of it.
- Judy Jones, Fort Worth
A small example for all of us?
It was reassuring to read Nicole Russell’s column “This Texas school district didn’t mandate masks during COVID. Here’s how that went,” (March 24, 9A) about the handling of the COVID-19 situation by the Peaster school district. Apparently, there are more-than-capable adults in Peaster, led by Superintendent Lance Johnson, who used a little common sense and logic as they navigated the mess created by the pandemic and the illogical reactions by most of the country.
Granted, a district the size of Peaster is probably easier to manage than a big-city district, but the direction and guidance provided by the administrators in Peaster could have, and should have, been used everywhere. I hope Peaster taught us a lesson in how to handle a crisis.
- Steve Himes, Fort Worth
An outlier, not a model
I read Nicole Russell’s column about how the Peaster ISD operated without mask mandates during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, looking for some shocking revelations about how federal health officials were wrong, but none came.
It was widely known that healthy young people would likely not experience the many devastating effects of COVID-19. The point of wearing masks was to stop the spread so that nobody spread it to the most vulnerable people.
With nearly 1 million dead and millions more living with terrible long-term effects (something Russell neglects to acknowledge), I’d say that the mandates were well called for and that the Peaster ISD dodged a bullet.
- S.R. DeWees, Arlington