Letters to the editor

There are groups in town who are focused on establishing help centers for youth who are in desperate situations, youngsters who have not been given the chance they deserve. They need a place to go where they can be free to create, a place for unconditional support, a place to call home sweet homeless. A hostel downtown would do essentially the same thing as a jail, except with positive results instead of negative consequences. Free art centers create more culture. New jails create more crime. Let’s support groups like the Mosaic Vortex, who have been working on getting a free art space for over one year now, without any monetary support from the city. Now it has come to our attention that the powers-that-be want to spend millions on another jail?! Speak out against the reckless, dangerous spending of our tax money on another haven for criminals, and let’s turn these impressionable youth into creative human beings instead of hardened cons. Let them create, don’t throw them in jail!

— Ism Love
Asheville

Strategies for reducing animal euthanasia

A recent letter in the Mountain Xpress [Jan. 24] misstated the number of animal euthanasias in our community. The letter claimed that “Buncombe County euthanizes close to 10,000 dogs and cats annually.” Asheville Humane Society operates the County Animal Shelter, and in the last 12 months, we euthanized 6,367 animals.

To be sure, even a single euthanasia of an adoptable animal is a tragedy. Every year, thousands of wonderful animals die in our community for lack of a good home. Euthanizing these animals is unquestionably the hardest job at the animal shelter, and we devote a lot of energy to finding ways to decrease euthanasia. Our strategy for reducing euthanasia has three parts.

Pet overpopulation remains the primary cause of euthanasia in our community. There are simply more cats and dogs than there are homes. Until this changes, we advocate that all dogs and cats be spayed or neutered at an appropriate age. Our community has a wonderful organization, the Humane Alliance, that offers low-cost spay and neuter surgeries for all dogs and cats.

As important as it is to spay and neuter companion animals, we also strongly encourage anyone seeking an animal companion to adopt from their local humane society or animal shelter. The more animals that we find homes for, the fewer animals we must euthanize. And all animals adopted from the shelter are spayed or neutered, in turn helping our community reduce animal overpopulation.

Many people decline to adopt from the shelter because they’re seeking a purebred animal. While mixed-breed animals make wonderful pets and often prove healthier than purebreds, your shelter can also help you find a fantastic purebred animal. In fact, about 25 percent of the animals at the shelter are purebred. We encourage people who are looking for a specific breed to contact the shelter. We keep lists of people looking for specific types of animals, and we can also put you in touch with breed placement programs, which help shelters find homes for homeless purebred animals.

The third part of our approach is education. One of the most common reasons that people bring animals to the shelter is that their pet is exhibiting undesirable behavior – excessive barking, soiling, aggressiveness and so on. Many, if not most, behavior problems can be corrected with humane training techniques. Asheville Humane Society can help you locate the resources you need to teach your pet proper behavior.

Although our current critical level of animal overpopulation means we must euthanize healthy dogs and cats, in the long term we must look to sustainable, humane solutions to the animal overpopulation problem. Please spay or neuter all your companion animals. Please adopt animals from your local animal shelter. And please contact us for information about pet behavior modification before you surrender an animal for behavioral problems.

Together, we can make a difference.

— Daniel Withrow, executive assistant
Asheville Humane Society

Bush’s proposed family-planning cuts are misguided and dangerous

Each year, 600,000 maternal deaths occur; essentially all take place in developing countries, and 72,000 are a result of unsafe abortions. Currently, U.S. law bans the use of international funds for abortion. If President Bush cuts all international family-planning aid to organizations that merely provide information about abortion, it will cost women in developing countries years of progress — and possibly their lives.

Ironically, this misguided move will increase abortion as it indiscriminately punishes organizations that provide comprehensive family-planning information.

Based on predictions made by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, adequate unrestricted international family-planning aid would mean:

• 11.7 million more couples in developing countries would have access to modern contraception, which would enable 4.3 million more women to avoid unintended pregnancy each year;

• 1.5 million fewer unintended births [and] 2.2 million fewer abortions; and

• 15,000 fewer women and 92,000 fewer children would die each year as a result of preventing high-risk pregnancies.

Improved access to family planning promotes a woman’s overall health and autonomy and enhances her educational and economic opportunities. Access to family planning is the key to saving the lives of women and children.

— Kristen Carswell, public affairs associate
Planned Parenthood of North Carolina — West
Asheville

U.N. sanctions against Iraq have punished the already-victimized

It is time to end the U.S.-led United Nations sanctions against Iraq. The 10-year-old sanctions, instituted after the Gulf War, have been completely ineffective in deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. In the meantime, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, more than 1 million Iraqis — mostly children under the age of 5 — have died from malnutrition and lack of medicine. Instead of punishing the tyrant, the U.N. sanctions have punished the tyrannized. A policy that kills children in an effort to spark political change is a wrong-headed policy. Please write Congress and the U.N. Let’s stop the sanctions now.

For more information, visit the Web site of the Campaign of Conscience for the Iraqi People at http://www.forusa.org/.

— Art Mandler
Asheville

New jail will make criminals out of more citizens

A new jail does nothing to improve the quality of life; rather, it just makes criminals out of more and more citizens. It may be true that the current facility is overcrowded (I can attest to that), but what is needed is a change of the system. The current political power system enforces many laws that deserve a second look. People being booked and jailed on account of minor infractions is an everyday occurrence in this overpoliced mini-metropolis. For instance, any given day at the courthouse one can find many defendants who have only been arrested for a charge called “resisting arrest without violence.” Only resisting arrest!? It seems the police officers sometimes just send people to jail for not wanting to go to jail. Argh!

But most of the nicer-dressed citizens would never check to see if the scoundrels they hired to protect the city are abusing the obscene amount of power given to them. Plus, have you ever noticed how many of these power-mongers are driving, walking or biking around this beautiful city? Cops are people too, it’s true, but an overabundance of anything is shown to be harmful. Instead of spending the tax dollars we pay on another criminal factory, maybe we can reduce taxes by cutting back on the number of officers on duty. Honestly, would you feel less safe if you only saw two cop cars pulling over Joe Q. Taxpayer instead of the three, four or five [that] is usually the case now? What if there were only four officers arresting someone for peeing outside or trespassing instead of the seven, eight or nine witnessed last summer? Ironically, it is shown that crime actually increases with more police on the streets; that is why we seem to need another jail. But if we could just see what crimes the people currently in jail are committing, we would probably find an abundance of marijuana, trespassing and resisting arrest charges — crimes that essentially harm no one, yet are frequently enforced by the Bored in Blue. And we would find a large number of social outcasts, deviates, etc. — the poorer citizens who cannot afford a good lawyer or even bail, so they are forced to sit in jail and get even more pissed off at the system. A new jail will bring new criminals, believe that. With more space to lock people up, what kind of ridiculous charges will they think of next? Let’s solve this problem before it happens, or we will all suffer the consequences.

— J. Moon
Asheville

Faith-based charities: a bad idea whose time has come

The government doesn’t belong in the business, and it is mostly a business, of religion. The Constitution seems to say so. Now, along comes a new stealth attack on the separation of church and state, promulgated mainly by the very people who used to stand tall for separation of church and state.

A new effort requires a new buzzword, so we have “faith-based charity.” The term is one of those combinations of words intended to quickly capture the hearts and minds of that vast sea of people who prefer to let someone else do their thinking for them.

“Faith-based charity” ought to look terrific on a bumper sticker: short and dumb. But when it’s held up to the light, faith-based charity supported by taxpayers sounds like taking our money and letting the government decide which religious cause is best for us. Even if you don’t have a religion, we’ll get you one.

Whether the idea will stand close study may depend on things we don’t even know about yet. Take the example of the proposal for people to put some of their Social Security money into the stock market when it seemed to be headed for outer space — a market that didn’t have the decency to continue its trip into the stratosphere and now seems to be trying very hard to tank. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. With the plan being proposed, I could take a tax deduction and the government would spend the money I didn’t give them to support a religious group I might not agree with. I could quit donating to my church because Washington has a better idea.

Some large organizations have fought very hard to maintain their tax-exempt status despite their political activities or because sometimes they don’t seem to be religious at all — e.g., The Church of Scientology. Does this mean, then, that an organization that can’t meet the IRS standards for a religious organization can still qualify for taxpayer money as a “faith-based charity”? Surely they’re not trying to have it both ways — that would be hypocritical.

Awareness of what is happening in the rest of the world should help keep us from getting too carried away. A recent Christian Science Monitor carried a story about work in India after their huge earthquake. Workers from a relief organization (Roman Catholic) attempting to provide help in one small-town hospital were “chased off with sticks, curses and threats” by townspeople, protesting the presence of foreigners of the “wrong” religion. Faith-based charity includes cuts and bruises?

I give freely, whenever I can, to the Salvation Army — fully aware that they are highly active in a religious way different from my own. If someone wants to support a faith-based charity, there are plenty of opportunities like this already available … but the government should stay out of it. My taxes go to support a lot of things I don’t approve of, but religion isn’t one of them (unless you call murdering nuns, priests and bishops in Nicaragua religious work).

That’s how I believe the Founding Fathers wanted it. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. As innocent and appealing as the term “faith-based charity” may sound rolling off pious and sanctimonious tongues, to this reader it sounds like a bad idea whose time has come.

— Allen Thomas
Asheville