Prayer Power
When I was in school, we had chapel first thing every morning. We were black, white, yellow -- Polish, Irish, Catholic and Protestant. We were all American-Americans.
We learned Catholics put ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday in repentance, and we shared matzot with the Jewish kids. We honored Christmas and Hanukkah.
The principal made a few announcements, read from Scripture. We said a prayer and listened with courtesy and decorum. We sang a song or two and left the auditorium feeling restored and hopeful.
What has replaced all this and prayer? Noise, discourtesy, insubordination, guns, condoms, insecurity, hopelessness.
' Bring back prayer.
Margaret Brent Grove
Baltimore
Let Us Pray
Both Mike Olesker (Nov. 20) and Roger Simon (Nov. 18) write that school prayer should not be allowed. Their reasoning is: If a student wants to pray, he or she can do it at home or anytime during the day. I disagree.
Children must be taught not only the Three Rs but all the other things that will make them decent human beings.
If a student is not taught respect at home or responsibility or self-discipline or how to pray, then the school should "try" to teach him.
If he is not taught in the home or at the school, where will he learn? On the street? On television? At the movies? No way! Just look at the results of no school prayers in schools for the last 30 years:
Prisons that are bulging at the seams. Our country that is slowly drowning in crime, teen pregnancies, divorce, child abuse and family breakdown.
This was not true 50 years ago, when our children lifted their voices to God for a minute to acknowledge him as the Creator.
Whether it was Holy Scripture or the Lord's Prayer, it at least was something. Today there is nothing.
So, if you want your country to be great again, start by teaching our students that God does exist, that he does love us and that we are his creatures on earth to do his will.
If you don't do this, I suggest you begin now to build more and bigger prisons. They will be needed soon.
F. Paul Galeone
Timonium
Suspension Bias
A report in The Sun Nov. 28 states that the suspension rate for blacks is twice that for whites in the Baltimore County school system.
This is almost exactly what would be expected were the data and analyses in "The Bell Curve" by the late Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray correct and fairly representative of the county school population.
Perhaps the disciplinary program is being conducted without bias. Making changes to get equal suspension rates for blacks and whites could well be acting to bias the program.
James D. Childress
Baltimore
A Doggie Life
Daniel Greenberg's Nov. 29 Opinion * Commentary piece makes several mis-assumptions in arguing that dogs be allowed in restaurants.
First, all dogs are not as well behaved as Mr. Greenberg's. In fact, my experience has been that most are not.
Second, although the same discipline (or lack thereof) argument can be applied to children, as human beings they have more legal rights than animals and cannot be left alone at home.
Third, unlike children, dogs shed hair that tends to show up in unfortunate places like hollandaise sauces and salads. And, lastly, many people are allergic to dogs.
I suggest that Mr. Greenberg travel to Europe with his pet or enjoy a quiet meal together at home to satisfy his desire for shared dining experiences with his dog.
Patricia Perry
Owings Mills
Con Job
Perhaps sooner than the Republican hierarchy desires, the American electorate will become exceedingly aware that the Republican "Con-trick" With America was a political scam.
Leon Peace Ried
Baltimore
Undeleted
The Sun ran a letter from me Nov. 21 about Susan Reimer's columns.
Unfortunately, a key phrase was deleted, changing the meaning of my letter.
The paragraph should have read as follows (the deleted portion is italicized):
"I am a professor in a women's college (Hood) and the women I have been surrounded by for the last 20 years have impressed me with their ability to celebrate their own strengths and those of others without resorting to dated, sexist stereotypes as is Ms. Reimer's wont.
F: In this day and age, her attitude is truly appalling."
Noel Lester
Frederick
Article on Welfare Shows Gullibility
The Sun has published very few articles in recent years that equal Richard O'Mara's "Are Orphanages Better for Kids Than Welfare?" (Perspective, Nov. 27) for . . .gullibility.
It is evident that the technique of the false dichotomy is the chief weapon of proponents of the status quo in welfare.
Careless talk about orphanages by some Republicans is being used to discredit the crux of their proposal: Immature teen-agers and their children should no longer be provided with unsupervised cash grants, but with maternity home care and supervised residences.
This is not a Dickensian scheme, unless contemporary Denmark, where it prevails, is to be deemed Dickensian.
Supervised mother and child homes are not inconsistent with "family preservation" but means to it. Mr. O'Mara portrays the mothers' pension laws of the 1920s as a rejection of this approach. He is dead wrong.
Virtually all the mothers' pension laws denied benefits to children of unwed mothers. A 1921 survey by the Children's Bureau revealed that of 60,119 mothers' pension recipients in that year, exactly 55 were unwed mothers.
The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program was sold to Congress as a program for widows.
One of its sponsors, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, was later reported to have observed that "it never occurred to her, in view of the fact that she'd been active in drives for homes that took care of mothers with illegitimate children, that these mothers would be called 'dependent' in the new legislation. She blamed the huge illegitimacy rates among blacks on aid to mothers with dependent children."
As a result of the welfare rights policies adopted in the late 1960s, teen-age mothers are now provided with unsupervised cash aid, and pregnancy is the road to economic emancipation and perceived maturity; income maintenance has been divorced from social services, and social workers have been expelled from welfare administration.
That the defenders of this state of affairs can pose as humanitarians is one of the wonders of the age.
When the mothers' pension laws were first proposed, one of the greatest of Baltimoreans, the pioneer social worker Mary Richmond, opposed their blanket adoption even for widows.
Her view was that "if individualized care is not necessary at this point, if 'case work' has no place, then we are confronted with the solitary exception in the whole range of social endeavor.
"Relief given without reference to friends and neighbors is accompanied by moral loss. Poor neighborhoods are doomed to grow poorer and more sordid whenever the natural ties of neighborliness are weakened by our well-meant but unintelligent interference."
The Talent bill has as its thrust the notion that the funds spent on cash grants for young mothers are more appropriately used for maternity home care, social work, parent training and adoption assistance.
The indiscreet reference to orphanages was intended to accommodate what Mr. O'Mara acknowledges to be "a significant and steady rise in the number of cases of abuse within families owing to the increase of drug use."
The choice is not between cash aid and orphanages, but between cash to teen-agers and adult-supervised assistance to families.
H. L. Mencken would have well understood Mr. O'Mara's style: "If you are against Dr. Quack's cancer cure, you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die. It is an old, old argument."
George W. Liebmann
Baltimore