Headline that would have quite a different meaning if it had appeared in a newsletter for salespeople, rather than in the newsletter of the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness (Visionary, Fall 1989): “Sleeping with contacts a no-no.”
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Drug wars: carefully selecting the enemy. “All of those [drug-enforcement] television documentaries show poor Blacks, whites, and Latinos spread-eagle across every possible surface. How many money-laundering bankers have we seen handcuffed on such shows?” growls William J. Leahy in Leahy’s Corner (December 1989). “How did drug rings start in poor communities? Where did the capital come from? When the federal government convicted Chicago policemen of letting drug sellers operate on the West Side, why weren’t the suburban white buyers charged? Is it cost effective from a law-enforcement viewpoint to run investigations in low-density, poor neighborhoods? Certainly every high-rise apartment and office building in Chicago has sellers and users. Why not carry out raids in buildings like Doral Plaza or the Standard Oil Building with cameras in tow? Why not hogtie the white secretary of a CEO and watch her wiggle on the floor…”
Why religious traditionalists don’t care for history. “Beginning with the New Testament…until the mid-19th century, slavery was justified as a morally acceptable expression of the divine will for human relations. Can anyone today doubt that such a long-established tradition was sinfully erroneous?” writes Garrett Theological Seminary professor Rosemary Radford Ruether from Evanston (Witness, April 1989). “Religious and racial animosity toward Jews has been accepted among Christians for an even longer period. Significant questioning of these views only began after the Holocaust of 1942-45…The history of sexism in the church parallels these forms of discrimination….Is it not likely that the exclusion of women from ordination reflects a similar history of error for which the churches have only begun to repent?”
Unaffirmative action. Ronald Tabak of the American Bar Association, quoted in the Chicago-based Human Rights (Winter 1989-90): “In state after state, statistical analysis reveals that the killer of a white is nearly three times more likely to receive the death penalty than the killer of a black in the 22 states where the death penalty has been imposed.”
