Opinion articles provide independent perspectives on key community issues, separate from our newsroom reporting.

Letters to the Editor

Reata restaurant’s move is a downtown red alert. Fort Worth needs you, Mayor Parker

Do we really want the area to return to the ghost town it once was?
Do we really want the area to return to the ghost town it once was? Star-Telegram file photo

Mayor Parker, we need leadership

In Thursday’s front-page story “Lease dispute pushes Reata out of Sundance Square” about Reata restaurant planning to move, Mayor Mattie Parker says she’s concerned about closings in Sundance Square. She adds: “But as your mayor, it does me no good to get in the middle” of business disputes.

Come on, Mayor Parker — show some leadership and quit trying to just get along with all the cool kids. Our downtown is falling apart and reverting to the ghost town it used to be.

- Anna M. Burns, Fort Worth

Why don’t we learn from history?

Two ancient religious holidays — Easter and Passover — have striking and tragic resonance in our time. As winter tentatively recedes, the world watches appalled as the crucifying of an entire people, the Ukrainians, unfolds hourly before our eyes.

Passover tells of the exodus of the Jewish people from ancient Egypt, and we now daily watch the exodus of millions of tormented Ukrainians, the newborn and the aged, from their country, seeking survival and safety in another land.

The moral lessons gleaned from those times appear to have acquired little staying power in the intervening millennia.

- Leonard Schweitzer, Benbrook

What about Texans’ concerns?

While the governor and his cronies worry about nonexistent election fraud, transgender kids and building a border wall, my property taxes keep going up and the roads are in need of repair. How about addressing real problems for a change?

- R.L. Drummond, North Richland Hills

Masks are off these Republicans

I’m grateful to Bud Kennedy for putting into mainstream print what has seemed so very obvious over these many years of anti-abortion campaigning by those on the religious right: that the only logical conclusion to their way of seeing things is to make abortion a capital offense, punishable by death. (March 27, 1C, “Texas Republicans debate killing women who get abortions”)

Perhaps now moderate Republicans, who have tolerated the co-opting of their party by these extremists, will wake up and vote out the theocrats who are masquerading as legitimate candidates in our pluralistic democracy.

- Caryl Sherman-Gonzalez, Fort Worth

I didn’t find any other fools

After reading Issac Bailey’s “Lindsey Graham plays the fool again at Jackson hearing” in the Xtra Opinion section of the March 28 eEdition, I went online to research his past columns. Nowhere could I find a similar piece about “fools” at the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. I wonder why?

- Ron De Roxtra, Arlington

Leta Andrews deserves better

Mac Engel’s commentary on Leta Andrews being snubbed (again!) by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was spot on. (March 29, 1A, “Hall’s ongoing snub of winningest prep coach reeks of sexism”)

Why is it that we all can see so clearly the path that Andrews paved for basketball and women, but the powers that be in Massachusetts continue to ignore it? Maybe it’s sexism.

- Betty Harrison, Granbury

A picture we didn’t need to see

We love the Star-Telegram and have been loyal subscribers for years. But I do not welcome or appreciate the photo with the movie review of “The Lost City” in Sunday’s Life & Arts section, with a revealing view of Sandra Bullock’s breasts. It demeans the paper, and I refused to read the article. Please make better choices for families.

- Susan Green, Arlington

Will Smith was a sideshow

We mustn’t focus too much on the violent action of Will Smith during the Oscars. The other attendees were peaceful.

- Jack D’Amario, Granbury

This is not a real solution

The author of a Thursday letter to the editor (9A) suggests a solution to problems with the Texas foster care system: Kill unwanted children before they are born. Really? Since when do two wrongs make a right?

Yes, address the foster care system’s problems, but in a moral, sensible, life-affirming way.

- Carolyn Allen, Fort Worth

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