No LePage mandate
I applaud Gov. Paul LePage’s desire to govern as if he had a mandate. It’s a great tactic and usually loudly proclaimed by people who’ve won a narrow election. So, good luck with that mandate thing. The bigger question is what he is going to do during the next four years and what policies will he be able to enact?
LePage does not have a mandate to cut funding to towns. Not in the slightest. It just raises property taxes. He does not have a mandate to ignore heat pumps, solar and wind power as he tries to make energy only about something that comes in a pipe from Texas or Saudi Arabia.
LePage seems obsessed with punishing the poor under the title of “welfare reform,” but he does not have a mandate to do so. He won with 48.2 percent, and those voting for Mike Michaud and Eliot Cutler totaled 51.7 percent.
We who voted against LePage and for others have a mandate for the Democrats serving in the Legislature. Their mandate is to fight for Mainers and not be “compromising” with the extreme positions of the governor and his allies. We need Democrats to stand firm and fight for a fair Maine.
There’s lots of work to do for jobs and energy, and if we focus on that, maybe there’s something to work together on. But Democrats: Do not be weak-willed handmaidens to the governor’s laundry list of extreme policies.
Mike Hurley
Belfast
Black and white statistics
According to professor Michael Rocque, “ What critics of the Ferguson protests are missing” (BDN, Dec. 23), the disproportionate rate of arrest and incarceration of blacks to whites in the United States isn’t because blacks commit more crimes, but because certain “institutions,” the justice system in particular, are racist and used to “control black bodies.”
So, one must ask: Are innocent blacks being arrested and sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit or are white perpetrators evading arrest and sentencing because they are privileged?
Apparently, if we’re to have true racial equality, we need to be more lenient toward black offenders and more aggressive toward white offenders until our statistics reflect the proper ratio of blacks to whites.
And, while we’re at it, perhaps we also should look into the statistics regarding sex, income levels and ethnicity, to make sure there’s no discrimination there.
David Smith
Newport
Pray for Mario Cuomo
In his Bloomberg View column in the Jan. 6 Bangor Daily News, columnist Albert Hunt is mistaken when he claims Mario Cuomo was “a devout Catholic but rejected the Catholic church’s rigid position against abortion.” Like any institution, the Catholic Church has core beliefs and principles that provide the church’s foundation. The sanctity of human life is one of those binding beliefs.
“Catholic public officials who disregard church teaching on the inviolability of the human person collude in the taking of innocent life.” ( U.S. Catholic bishops,1998). In Jeremiah 1:5, God tells us, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” And in Matthew 25:34, God tells us, “Whatever you do to the least you do to me.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2271, teaches, “Since the first century the church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means is gravely contrary to the moral law: You shall not kill the embryo by abortion and shall not cause the newborn to perish. God, the Lord of life, has entrusted to men the noble mission of safeguarding life, and men must carry it out in a manner worthy of themselves. Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: Abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”
Catholics should pray for the soul and repentance of Mario Cuomo as we would for our own relatives and friends.
Ronald J. Stauble Sr.
Unity