Theresa Rice’s letter of Jan. 31 decrying attacks on government property displaying religious imagery is short on actual argumentation for her position. Virtually since its existence, religion has been the victimizer of secular individuals, and Rice’s invocation of intolerance for religion rings false. Additionally, she offers no rationale for why a secular taxpayer should be forced to promote a religious worldview with which he or she disagrees. Suggesting that this type of activism by the secular community is akin to religious persecution in the Soviet Union, as Rice does, is a wholly inapplicable, false analogy. What secular society desires is for government to take no official position on religion, irrespective of the ubiquity of Christians in the U.S. population. Meanwhile, in his Feb. 1 letter to the editor opposing abortion rights, Ray Ferguson poses the question, what issue is more important than protecting the innocent, defenseless, pre-born children and expectant mothers? My answer is that the protection of individual rights, which are wholly inapplicable to a fetus, are paramount. A woman has an inalienable right to her own body, even when a fetus is living within it. As a fetus is physiologically and anatomically dependent upon the woman in whom it is contained, it can have no rights apart from those of the woman involved.
