Letters on letters: Readers respond to each other

We do not run many letters to the editor responding to other letters. With such a small piece of newsprint real estate to allocate among the hundreds of letters sent each week to [email protected], priority is given to submissions responding to Times Op-Ed articles, editorials and news stories. But this isn’t to say that letters responding to what other readers say don’t come in.

This was especially true this week, when the letters page carried reader responses addressing hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage, the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death and more. About three-dozen readers wrote “letters to letters� (as I like to call them) this week; here is a small selection.

—Paul Thornton, letters editor

Re Leon M. Salter’s May 5 letter crediting President Obama for the killing of Osama bin Laden

After reading this half-truth opinion about President Obama taking down Osama bin Laden, I would have thought the picture above the opinion would have had our president in fatigues with an assault rifle in his hand.

What Salter left out was where the Obama administration got the intelligence that led to the killing of Bin Laden. Could some of it have come from using “enhanced interrogation� tactics under the Bush administration, which Obama has been so adamantly against?

Yet Obama had no problem taking all the glory

when this would help his reelection chances.

Randy E. Aldridge

Palmdale

Re G.V. Climaco’s May 10 letter on the biological case against same-sex marriage

The case for or against same-sex marriage is not, as the writer claims, closed. He assumes that people marry only to “propagate the

species.�

My husband and I had no intention of having children when we decided to marry. Does that make our marriage unnatural? We married because we love each other, because we wanted the joy and comfort of sharing our lives. We married rather than just living together because we wanted the public, civic and legal commitment that marriage is.

As it turned out, we did have one son, whom we love dearly. But the point is that we married without any intent to “propagate the species.�

The case is not closed.

Catherine M. Crook

Camarillo

Re Lance Pedriana’s May 10 letter claiming liberals are responsible for progress in America

The writer says that the dictionary definition of “liberal� — open to change and reform — proves that conservatism was not the central feature of the American revolution, and that all human progress has come from liberalism.

But using that definition, surely the party roles have been reversed, as more than one pundit has observed. Today, the Democratic Party fights against any attempts to reform Social Security (and thus save the system from inevitable collapse), welfare policy that punishes two-parent families and pushes families into high-crime housing projects with little hope of escape, fiscal policy and more.

Thanks to the reader for his argument for conservatism.

W.A. Sauvageot

Tustin

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