Letters to the editor: Ominous ‘other plans’?
EAST MARION
Ominous ‘other plans’?
I just finished reading about the Strong’s plan for expansion (“Strong’s latest expansions proposal deemed ‘incomplete,’” Sept. 19).
It was just tabled again — and the last sentence in the article alluded to the fact that if it didn’t go through that they had “other plans” for that property and that it would be very different from a shipyard. Sounds like a threat that houses would be built instead.
Barbara Betsch
SOUTHOLD
Stepmom speaks out
Many years ago I bought a ceramic sign that touched my heart. It reads “Families are like quilts. Lives pieced together. Stitched with smiles and tears. Colored with memories and bound by love.” It spoke to my heart because I am a stepmother.
Lately I have discovered that the spokespeople for one of our political parties considers me to be childless and lacking in humility. I beg to differ, and so does my family.
My stepchildren didn’t choose to lose their mother to cancer when they were teenagers. They also didn’t choose me as their stepmother. I chose to love them and give them the time and space they needed to learn to love me. Almost 30 years later I can tell you that we are a success story. My relationship with my kids is the greatest joy in my life. We are closer than many biological families.
Parenting your own children may well be humbling. Loving your spouse’s children as if they were your own is no less humbling. I may have never given birth – but I am not childless. I am a proud stepmother and grandmother.
Here’s to all of the step-parents, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors who love and support our children! We are stronger because of you all. We see you and we value you.
Barbara Wasilausky
CUTCHOGUE
A ‘terrifying’ headline
Regarding the letter to the editor titled “We’re all the problem” (Sept. 19): My heart goes out to readers who continue to believe America is a place somewhere over the rainbow, where both sides hammer out their differences for the good of the country. However, blaming both sides is not the way to bring back that dream. Not anymore.
Consider the following from last week alone: Speaking in Nassau County, Trump again called out Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who are there legally to work. Earlier, after a series of bomb threats, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, had sent state troopers into schools. Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who basically admitted on CNN that claims about immigrants eating pets were false, continued to spread the lies.
Trump doubled down on the absurd claim that Kamala Harris never identified as Black before she ran for president. Imagine accusing an Irish-Italian politician of denying their paternal or maternal side before changing course for political gain? Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X and Trump’s pal, retweeted a bogus claim that a bomb had been discovered near the Nassau Coliseum on the night the ex-president was speaking.
ProPublica released a story on Amber Nicole Thurman, a nursing student from Georgia, who died in 2022 from an infection due to unexpected complications after an abortion, which “her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.” Instead, doctors watched her deteriorate over the course of 20 hours due to the state’s prohibitive abortion law, passed only a month before her death.
The headline [on that letter] terrifies me. It is well past time for voters to wake up.
William Sertl
ORIENT
I’m voting for equality
“It’s been two years since the disastrous Dobbs decision – every week we seem to see a new assault on basic reproductive freedom, from IVF to contraception. That’s why passing the Women’s Health Protection Act needs to be a top priority when Democrats retake the House.” That is a quote from John Avlon, who has my vote to represent our district in Congress, and has pledged to vote for that act.
Our current representative, Nick Lalota, voted against it. He applauded Dobbs; he supports Speaker [Mike] Johnson, sponsor of a national abortion ban, who wants to criminalize doctors for providing health care, and opposes contraception.
Criminalize doctors for providing health care to women? If you miscarry, doctors who are afraid of state bans will refuse care and you will die. This has happened. Where will it end? Restricting access to IVF as Project 2025 calls for? This is terrifying. This is a slippery slope from having rights to having none.
Like Taylor Swift, Liz Cheney and her dad, I’ll be voting for Harris/Walz to protect women’s rights and freedom. “When I talk about freedom, I mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions,” Tim Walz said.
Why does anyone want to criminalize women’s health care, to go backward? It is wrong. It is dangerous. Most Americans agree with me — we want our sisters, daughters, nieces and granddaughters to be equal, to feel respected, to live as equals. They deserve it. We can give them that.
Mary Morgan
CUTCHOGUE
Foreseeable and preventable
In many areas of the law, foreseeability of damage to another is an essential element in establishing liability on the part of the actor.
When Donald Trump appointed three right-wing actors to the Supreme Court, it was foreseeable they would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade He said he’d appoint these kinds of people, and he did. Then, each of them perjured themselves under oath at their [Senate] confirmation hearings, claiming that Roe was “settled law” or they believed in stare decisis (to wit, following precedent) and, since there was no case before them to overturn Roe, they could offer no other assurances other than to follow settled law or precedent.
These three, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, justices Thomas and Alito, who years ago had given the Senate the same dishonest assurances on settled law and stare decisis about Roe in their own hearings.
But the Supreme Court didn’t say that women do not have the Constitutional right to health care. No indeed. Instead, they cleverly said Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided because whether a woman is entitled to reproductive health care is a matter for each state to decide, not the federal courts.
And again, it was clearly foreseeable that if the matter of reproductive health care were sent back to the states, it would not take very long before red state legislatures began enacting abortion bans. And it was clearly foreseeable that once those bans were in place – threatening health care professionals with jail terms for performing an abortion – it would only be a matter of time before someone died because of failure to deliver needed and obvious lifesaving medical treatment.
And now we see the cases of Candi Miller and Amber Thurman, who didn’t need to die. But their deaths, which were preventable, were foreseeable. They were foreseeable to the president who appointed Supreme Court justices who would eliminate their Constitutional rights. They were foreseeable to the justices who voted to take away those rights. And they were foreseeable to all the right-wing Republican legislators and governors who enacted laws that virtually guaranteed their deaths — and who knows how many others.
No one is being held accountable for their foreseeable and preventable deaths. Not Donald Trump, not the justices who ended Roe v. Wade, not the right-wing legislators who passed Draconian laws, not the governors who signed those bills, not anyone.
The only way these foreseeable deaths will ever see any accountability is when we all go to the polls in November. We need to vote as if someone’s life depended on it, because it does. The people who did this must be removed from positions of power.
Michael Levy
LAUREL
Thumbs-up on reuse of commercial space
I applaud the Town of Southold’s plan for the use of the former Capital One Bank branch in Mattituck.
It is in keeping with the commercial uses along Love Lane, provides affordable rental units that are far preferable to a hotel, is within walking distance to public transportation and is not far from shopping.
I would like to see attention given to the Arcade building on Front Street in Greenport, a building that in its present state provides no benefit to the community.
John Viteritti
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