Women’s Resource Center unfairly excluded from article
I am the self defense coordinator at the ASUA Women’s Resource Center. I read your article on self defense (“”Fighting back against rape,”” Oct. 6, 2008) and I was disappointed to see that your reporter chose to omit the Women’s Resource Center from the story.

The self defense class is one of the Women’s Resource Center’s main strings of programming and is made possible through the dedication, funding and efforts of our office. We worked in equal collaboration with OASIS to make the self defense class happen and I am incredibly disappointed that this wasn’t made known to the readers of the article. It was such a disappointment because the women at the UA need to know that they can turn to the Women’s Resource Center when they are seeking a self defense workshop and other programs, such as our movie series, SafeWalk and sexual education. The Women’s Resource Center puts on so many events in collaboration with other social justice organizations, which I am sure you’ll be interested in covering, and I hope that you will urge your reporters to provide the proper details to Daily Wildcat readers in the future.

Katie McCallister
sophomore majoring in family studies and human development

Letter writer needs civics lesson
I find John Winchester’s response to Julianna Bradley’s letter in opposition to Arizona’s Prop. 102 (Mailbag, Oct. 6, 2008) incredibly disturbing. Not only does Mr. Winchester not understand basic American civics, but he has also failed to understand what discrimination means.

Winchester, please allow me to help you and the rest of the bigots out there supporting this most vile and malicious of Arizona ballot measures. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines discrimination as: “”The process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently.””

Just for fun, let us juxtapose heterosexual and LGBTQ relationships. I mean, that is what this proposition is essentially doing – to place two different lifestyles next to each other in an attempt to define one as more right or superior to the other, is it not? Never you mind that what this proposition does (and to take your Founding Fathers’ word) is “”usurp”” a personal decision out of the hands of countless Americans, while affirming an elite status-quo for countless others.

Winchester’s idea that this proposition is necessitated by the decisions of activist courts is absurd. In terms of structure, the governmental problem is based in legislative attacks like Prop. 102, which undermine the judiciary’s decision-making abilities. We live in a republic with checks and balances that not only prevent the tyranny of government but also the tyranny of the masses.

In an age when conservatives have blacklisted the phrase “”separation of church and state,”” a logically sound argument has become tragically and dangerously diminished. Still, this is undeniably a matter of separation of church and state and as such, is a matter of incredible importance. This religiously based quest to inhibit and strip the rights of the LGBTQ community is nothing short of cruel religious persecution, and in this instance, your religious-based morality is just as relative as someone’s preference of mild or spicy.

This proposition’s reappearance for this election cycle is a categorical folly and Arizonans, both LGBTQ and straight, deserve better. I challenge Winchester, and others who are in support of this hate-inspired proposition to look beyond the institutionally discriminatory ideas of our society’s past and take a step forward. Regardless of your political affiliation or party, I implore you to vote no on Proposition 102 – not because you can, as Winchester suggests, but because it is the right thing to do.

James Pennington-McQueen
senior majoring in history and political science