Texas made a grave mistake with abortion law
The recent Texas abortion law incentivizes bounty hunters to sue anyone who helps a woman in any way gain access to an abortion. Those with bounties on their heads include doctors, nurses, receptionists, donors to Planned Parenthood, newspaper reporters, Uber drivers, judges, politicians, police and CVS workers. When the next set of similarly functioning laws are approved a woman gaining access to an abortion may be replaced with anyone jaywalking, anyone buying a gun or anyone who disagrees with me. The Supreme Court’s upholding of this wild west approach to the law is a grave mistake.
Tom Verkozen, Lagunitas
Reallocate war funds
If the war in Afghanistan was costing $300 million a day and is now over and Social Security and health care are running a deficit, doesn’t it follow that the war dollars should now be used for those programs?
Neil Davis, Sebastopol
Hypocritical ban
Regarding “High court not blocking near-total abortion ban” (Sept. 2): In the wake of the Supreme Court’s predictable refusal to overturn Texas’ draconian antiabortion “Heartbeat Law,” I tried to imagine what it would
be like to be a young, poor, frightened, pregnant woman in Texas wanting desperately to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
I couldn’t imagine the depths of hopelessness and abandonment she would feel. How ironic that the people of the great state of Texas decry any and (almost) all government overreach into their lives, including mask mandates, vaccination requirements and
federal oversight of their power grid that predictably and tragically failed in 2021, but they are very comfortable with the government overreaching into a woman’s uterus, and interfering with her ability to make sensitive reproductive health decisions privately with her medical provider. Take heart, young desperate Texans, you may not be able to safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy, but you’ll be able to carry a handgun in the Longhorn State without the annoying requirement of firearm training or a background check.
Barry Goldman-Hall, San Jose
Forests need protection
The headline “Massive exodus from Tahoe Basin cauldron” (Front Page, Aug. 31), sends a clear message that no area is immune to wildfires. Therefore, this state can never continue to allow corporate forestry companies to develop or maintain their tree farms, which start with the innocuous term “evenaged management.” That plan is aimed at the fanciful bonanza of future market profits. Each action requires use of the destructive timber harvest called clear-cutting to strip a 20-acre tract to remove mature native trees; they ignore the value of those same trees that had been providing a windbreak to limit progress of lightning-set wildfires.
In the clear-cut tracts they then plant tiny fire-vulnerable saplings which would never survive the predicted drought or fire itself to reach market in 20 years. Now is the time to ask Gov. Gavin Newsom, your legislators and the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to declare an end to tree farms with its clear-cutting and toxic herbicides, and to allow only selective, sustainable timber harvest in the future.