Realistic Reform

Many thanks to whoever wrote the Feb. 14 editorial, "Schaefer's 'Family Cap'."

It was the best view I've read on the importance -- or the necessity -- of Medicaid funding for abortion, which is the cornerstone of realistic welfare reform.

Please keep on hammering the truth home. Medicaid abortions cost about $300, but the cost of raising an unwanted child cannot be measured either in money or in heartache.

As an active member of the Maryland Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, I do not advocate abortions. But I do believe that every woman should be given a choice, and that her economic status should not limit her.

Mildred K. Sheff

Pikesville

See the Light

In the editorial "Assault Pistols Under Assault" (March 8), you state "there is little or no sporting or self-defense use" for these weapons.

A few years back, your paper supported the legislation that created the Maryland Handgun Roster Board. That board was created to ban weapons that had no self-defense or sporting use.

The weapons that you now wish to have banned have been approved for sale in Maryland by a board that you helped to create.

The board that you helped to create has said that these weapons have a legitimate use in this state, or else they could not be sold.

When will you finally see the light? Violent crime will not be stopped until we hold criminals responsible for what they do and not the inanimate objects they use?

David B. Humes

Essex

More Opera

I also have listened to classical radio in Baltimore for many years. Unlike recent letter writer Edward A. Riggio (March 10), I am less interested in fugues or organ works. I enjoy the kind of music given by WBJC.

The simple reason is that I find it familiar and entertaining. I submit that he is being a little narrow himself about classical programming. WBJC provides "Listener's Choice" every Friday night, which enables callers to choose any kind of music they like, including organ pieces.

The broadcasting of programs such as the Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, among others, provides an avenue for many different varieties of classical music.

I very much appreciate the broadcasting of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons. If I have any complaint, it is that I do not hear enough opera music, especially arias and other vocal pieces, as well as the overtures the writer complains of.

Edward K. Cassedy

Monkton

Biased Headlines

The above-the-fold headline of your March 5 story about the arrest of suspects for the murder of Morgan State student Sean Jones read, "2 Coppin students arrested in slaying."

The headline of the page 3 continuation of the story read, "MORGAN: 2 from Coppin arrested in slaying."

On page 2 of the same Maryland section, another headline read, "2 college students guilty in homeless man's death."

It wasn't until the third-to-last paragraph of that article that I learned that the two convicted men were students at Anne Arundel Community College.

Questions: Why is it that the headline writers called attention to the college (Coppin) in one case, and not in the other (Anne Arundel Community College)?

Could it be that some (unrecognized) bias is at play? Was the name of the institution more significant to the story in the one case than in the other?

Your staff should examine its collective conscience about whether it treats "black" news differently from "white" news.

Edward Sommerfeldt

Baltimore

B6 The writer is a professor at Coppin State College.

Monuments of the Great

As a distant cousin of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, I feel compelled to reply to Linda Monk's Feb. 25 Opinion * Commentary article, "Lawn Jockey at the State's Front Door."

She is very clever in first listing all of the arguments opposing her point of view, but that doesn't make those arguments any less valid, or hers any less specious.

She still makes the all too common error of applying the social, legal and political values of 1994 to events of the 19th century.

Although she denies it, she clearly demands that we purge history to suit her particular 20th century political agenda. Her logic implies that monuments to state and national leaders of the past who owned slaves, committed other acts that we may find " repugnant today, or with whom we have some historical disagreement should be destroyed and cast out of our national life.

If we follow this course and start tearing down monuments to conform to some present-day value system that has taken 218 years to evolve, or to appease any group's version of what history should have been, instead of what it was, where will this absurdity end?

We certainly should destroy the Lincoln Memorial because of all the Taney-like statements that he made. Republicans, when they are in power, will remove the monuments to Democrats, and in their time Democrats will act with similar malice.

A hundred years from now, if the history of the Vietnam War is rewritten, it is possible that the monuments to the heroes of that conflict will be removed.

All of this is just plain wrong.

Ms. Monk bases her attack solely on the Dred Scott case, a decision that she concedes was viewed in 1857 as being faithful to a conservative reading of the Constitution.

For Maryland, Taney certainly was an unsung hero.

He stood for the rule of law against the tyranny of the Lincoln government while Maryland suffered under the heel of military occupation, an occupation that included the arrest and nTC imprisonment of Maryland legislators, judges and citizens without trial, charge or writ; as well as the suppression of its free press and military interference in its free elections.

It was the remnant of that vindictive government that refused to place a bust of the chief justice in the court chamber after his death in 1864.

Elliott Cummings

Baltimore

____________

Taney's infamous Dred Scott decision -- that African-Americans have no rights that whites are bound to respect -- put him forever on the wrong side of history.

I am more concerned with putting up statues than taking them down. As a classroom teacher at Baltimore's Grove Park Elementary School, I wish I could take my students to admire a bronze statue of Frederick Douglass in Fells Point, where he was a ship caulker and where he started his career as the nation's greatest anti-slavery crusader.

I wish I could take them to Talbot County to admire a granite statue of Harriet Tubman, the "Moses of her people," who led more than 300 slaves to freedom. Douglass and Tubman were Maryland's proudest son and daughter.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in their greatness, could not escape the predicament that they signed a declaration that all people are "created equal," even as they owned human chattels.

It took courageous men and women like Douglass and Tubman -- slaves -- to end that curse. They are founders of our nation.

In honoring them, we would understand our own history and who we are as a people.

We should awake from our collective amnesia. The fact that no tall statues of them stand in the main parks of our "Monumental City" or in Annapolis proves we still have far to go to achieve race and sex equality.

Joyce P. Wheeler

Baltimore

Don't Blame Farmers for Nitrogen Overload

When scientists begin to assess the impact of the winter of '94 on the Chesapeake Bay, farmers could get a bum rap.

While farmers make major and often costly efforts to maximize fertilizer use and reduce nutrient overload, other ice and snow-bound citizens have been encouraged to use commercial fertilizers and other synthetic concentrates as ice melting compounds.

Tons of these materials were sold during the course of this stormy winter.

One such was advertised "for sidewalks and driveways." The formulation consisted of 18 percent urea, 32 percent potash and 50 percent "grit or filler . . . to prevent slippage."

It doesn't take a Chesapeake Bay scientist to know where all that fertilizer went when the snow and ice melted on those impervious sidewalks and driveways.

It went into gutters and then into storm drains and then into waterways of some sort, all leading to the bay.

If one family in 10 in the Chesapeake Bay watershed purchased a 40-pound bag of 10 percent nitrogen fertilizer and used it on their walk or driveway, it could account for more than one million additional pounds of nitrogen in the bay.

If the bag contained urea, multiply that nitrogen overload by 4.5.

And that's just one bag in one storm.

The point is this: When, come spring, those elevated nitrogen levels show up in the bay, don't automatically point fingers at the farmers.

The idea of using fertilizer as a de-icer no doubt was well-intentioned, but, from the point of view of protecting the bay, it was hasty and improper. It also disregarded the continuing efforts of farmers and other citizens to reduce nutrient runoff.

Most Maryland farmers are doing their part in the effort to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay. They don't want to take a rap for something they didn't do.

(There will soon be an alternative to the traditional use of salt, by /the way.

An "environmentally friendly" de-icer derived from corn, a renewable resource, is expected to be available next year.)

Ed Stanfield

Randallstown

The writer is a member of the Maryland Grain Producers

Association.