Are You (a Supporter of) MADD?

The 4-Ls series of blog articles ended on May 30, but this post harks back to the first L. It is about the unnecessary and preventable loss of life of many thousands of people each year in the U.S. 

Do you know who Candy Lightner is? I didn’t until this past March when I heard a church woman talk about her in a worship service at First Baptist Church of Kansas City (Mo.).

Ms. Lightner, whose name was Candace Doddridge when she was born in May 1946, had the devastating experience of having her 13-year-old daughter Cari killed by a drunk driver in May 1980. Just four months later, she founded MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving.)

By 1985, MADD had grown into an international organization with over two million members in more than 400 chapters worldwide and an annual budget exceeding $12,000,000.

Amid allegations of financial mismanagement, in 1985 Candy left the organization she founded, but MADD has continued to be a strong organization to the present day.

While writing this article, for the first time I made a contribution to MADD and became a supporter. (Click here if you’d like to do the same.) The receipt I received notes,

Gifts from friends like you have helped cut deaths from drunk driving in half over the last four decades. More than 450,000 lives have been saved, and we’ve been able to compassionately serve more than 900,000 victims [bolding added].

In 2011, Lightner started a new organization. It is called We Save Lives and focuses on reducing drugged, drunk, and distracted driving. It is still active, but it seems to be less effective than MADD.

Surprisingly, Lightner said in a 2002 newspaper article (see here) that MADD had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

In that article, she also said that she disassociated herself from MADD because she believed the organization was headed in the wrong direction, that is, putting too much emphasis on not drinking.

Accordingly, she doesn’t encourage people not to drink; rather, she wants people to “drink responsibly”—and that is the same appeal made in beer advertisements I hear while listening to baseball or basketball games on the radio.  

Candy seems to think that it is not alcohol that causes so many traffic fatalities, it is drunk drivers who cause those deaths. That sounds to me very similar to those who oppose gun control when they say it is not guns that kill people, it is those who do not use guns responsibly. Aren’t both technically correct?

Most people who drink alcohol do not drive drunk, and most gun owners do not misuse their firearms and shoot other people. But are we OK with the number of people who die each year both as a result of gun violence and drunk driving?

Despite all the good work that MADD has done, a large number of people die in drunk-driving crashes every week. According to this website, the U.S. Department of Transportation states that over 13,500 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths in 2022. Then they say, “These deaths were all preventable.”

If there were a U.S. airplane crash that killed more than 200 people, it would be considered a major tragedy and would long be in the national news. Except for the terrorist-caused crashes in 2001, the last U.S. airplane crash with 200+ fatalities was TWA flight 800 off the coast of New York in July 1996.

But think about it: there is now an average of about 260 deaths caused by drunk driving in the U.S. every week of the year! But these deaths don’t make more than the local news.

If MADD has, indeed, saved more than 450,000 lives in the last four decades, and I have no reason to dispute that claim, I am truly grateful and plan to continue supporting their work.

Doesn’t more need to be done, though? Will we just ignore the likelihood that far more than 260 people will be killed by drunk drivers during the first week of July? Or is that something that causes us to be/support MADD?

Still Pessimistic about Gun Control

The following is not what I planned (and partially wrote) for today. Rather, it is quite similar to the article I posted on Jan. 10, 2013 (see here), but it is more than just a repeat or an update. 

Less than a month after the unbelievably tragic Sandy Hook mass school shooting in Connecticut, I wrote about my staunch support for increased gun control in this country—and my serious doubts that there would be any meaningful legislation passed. And, indeed, there wasn’t.

And now in 2022 there have been mass shootings in Buffalo (N.Y.) and Uvalde (Tex.) and . . . and . . . .

While there is a small glimmer of hope that some minimal gun control legislation might soon be passed by the U.S. Congress, there is not much possibility, it seems, that there will be any bans on the sale of AR-15 type of assault weapons.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why any private citizen needs to own a high-powered assault rifle, but from what I read (here), a federal ban on such weapons “stands no chance of winning the needed 60-votes in the Senate.”

But as Eugene Robinson posted on June 6, “We’ll get less than half a loaf on gun control. We should take it.” So, yes, something is better than nothing. But I am pessimistic because of my doubts that that something will substantially reduce the mass shootings that have become so common. 

In addition to guns, alcohol is also the cause of needless deaths daily. According to USDoT, every day “about 32 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes. . . . In 2020, 11,654 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths.” Some of them were school-aged children.

When 20 children are killed by a needless mass shooting, it is, certainly, an unspeakable tragedy. But is the pain and suffering any worse than that of the families of 20 children killed, separately, in needless drunk-driving accidents?

I assume that (probably) all my many “liberal” friends are strongly in favor of significant gun control legislation. But I also assume that maybe all of those friends, most of whom drink alcohol to varying degrees, would not support any ban on alcoholic beverages.

Again, I assume those friends would say that the problem is not alcohol but irresponsible drinking and people who break the anti-DUI laws. And to a large extent, they are probably right. But isn’t that exactly the same sort of argument the anti-gun control people widely use?

I still support widespread gun control legislation, and I firmly believe that such legislation would reduce both the number of homicides and suicides.

But even with the passage of such legislation, the number of gun deaths would likely remain high—just as the number of drunk-driving deaths is high in spite of strong anti-DUI laws and the legal drinking age being 21 (rather than 18 as it is now for assault rifles.)

Despite, or in ignorance of, the data, the general public lives with—and are seemingly not particularly upset by—the 11,600+ yearly deaths in the U.S. because of “drunk-driving crashes,” which DoT says “were all preventable.”

Perhaps that is all that can be expected about mass shootings (and all gun-related deaths) as well, despite the media mania when tragedies such as the one in Uvalde occur.

But put things in perspective: the percentage of children killed by a mass killer inside a school is really very, very small.

Since I live in Missouri, I researched the number of school deaths by shootings in the state. According to this website, only 14 people in Missouri have been shot to death at school over the past 50 years—and none of those was by a mass shooting.

In 2021 there were over 860,000 K-12 students in Missouri schools, and many of these were in the 2,200+ elementary schools. Why should so many children (or parents) be traumatized by fear of what, odds are, will never happen in their (or their children’s) classroom?

They are most likely safer there than in the family car going on a 50-mile highway trip. 

The Tragedy of a Promising Young Woman

It was quite rare for me, but the other night after a movie June and I watched that evening, I not only dreamed about the film but also lay awake thinking for a while about the problems portrayed in it. The movie was Promising Young Woman.  

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman

A Noteworthy Film

Wikipedia’s article about Promising Young Woman says it is “a 2020 American black comedy thriller film . . . .Carey Mulligan stars as a woman who seeks to avenge her best friend, who was a victim of rape.”

I don’t want to be a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the movie yet, so suffice it to say that when Cassie, the Carey Mulligan character, was a medical student, her fellow student Nina was raped at a party. That led to the death of Nina and to Cassie’s withdrawal from med school.

At the age of 30, Cassie is still a troubled soul and in devious ways seeks revenge for her wronged friend. How she gets her revenge makes for an intriguing movie, which seemed to us much more of a tragic thriller than a comedy of any sort.

Promising Young Woman picked up five nominations for this year’s Oscars, including best film and best actress.

A Noteworthy Actress

This is the third movie I have seen this year starring Carey Mulligan. After reading noted Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian science fiction novel Never Let Me Go, I watched the 2010 movie by the same name, which stars Mulligan.

Then June and I watched An Education, the 2009 coming-of-age drama film in which Mulligan was the leading actress—and I was impressed with her again. So even before the Academy Award nominations were announced, we placed Promising Young Woman on our Netflix DVD queue.

As I feared would be the case, Mulligan was not nearly as “wholesome” in the new movie as she was in the two made ten years earlier. But she certainly played a powerful part, and I was impressed with her acting ability in the somewhat sordid role of a troubled woman seeking revenge.

Noteworthy Problems

The central problem that lay beneath Promising Young Woman was that of excessive drinking and men taking advantage, or at least trying to take advantage, of inebriated women.

A writer on the March 26 BBC News website (see here) called Mulligan’s film “deeply troubling.”

The writer, director, and producer of Promising Young Woman is Emerald Fennell, who like Mulligan was born in London in 1985. The BBC article says that she drew on her own experiences seeing drunk girls being taken advantage of. “It’s a huge part of hook-up culture,” she stated.

Fennell goes on to say that “there still isn't that much opprobrium [= harsh criticism] on people who sleep with very drunk girls. It was absolutely commonplace when I was growing up, I think probably in most places it still is.”

Of course, the main problem is that of men taking advantage of intoxicated girls. Without question, no one should be taken advantage of for any reason at any time.

But excessive drinking is also a grave problem. Nina was in a position to be taken advantage of because of being drunk, but her male classmate(s) who raped her had, no doubt, been drinking heavily also. If they had been sober, surely they would not have raped her (and videoed it) at the party.

There still tends to be the inclination to blame victims. Last month the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a defendant could not be found guilty of rape because the woman got drunk voluntarily beforehand (see here). That was a highly questionable ruling.

No woman deserves to be raped for any reason, ever.

As in my dream, I still feel troubled that so many women are taken advantage of—and that (intemperate) drinking is so often a major factor in the tragic lives of many promising young women (and men).

_____

** Those who have seen the movie may be interested in this insightful review article posted April 7 on the website of Baptist News Global.

In Honor of Susan B. Anthony, Persistent Agitator

Born 200 years ago, on February 15, 1820, for nearly sixty years before her death at the age of 86, Susan B. Anthony was an active agitator for change. In a letter she wrote in 1883, Anthony (SBA) said, 

SBA: Agitator for Temperance

Because of her concern for abused women and children, Anthony’s first public activity as an agitator was in the temperance movement, which was the effort to outlaw alcohol. (Many of you saw my related 2/9 blog article about Prohibition.)

In 1848 when she was 28 years old, Susan’s first public speech was given for temperance.

In her book Susan B. Anthony (2019), Teri Kanefield wrote about how Anthony “spoke passionately about ‘the day when our brothers and sons shall no longer be allured from the right by corrupting influence’ of alcohol so that ‘our sisters and daughters shall no longer be exposed to the half-inebriated seducer’” (p. 40).

In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and colleague, and the following year they founded the Women's New York State Temperance Society.

(In 1999, Ken Burns produced “Not For Ourselves Alone,” a splendid, 210-minute  documentary about Anthony and Stanton; June and I enjoyed watching it last year on PBS.)

The next year, 1853, after being denied the opportunity to speak at a temperance convention because she was a woman, Anthony realized that no one would take women in politics seriously unless they had the right to vote. Thus, the seeds of her most important work as an agitator for women’s rights were planted.

SBA: Agitator for Abolition

For the next twelve years, however, Anthony worked for the abolition of slavery. In 1849, while still in her 20s, Susan met Frederick Douglass, who was two years older than she, and they were friends and colleagues—and antagonists—in the fight for equality until his death in 1895.

As a Quaker, Anthony believed that all people were of equal worth and should be treated equally. That belief undergirded her work for the rights of women. But in the 1850s and early 1860s, she was focused primarily on eradicating slavery in the U.S.

In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, which William Lloyd Garrison had co-founded in 1833. Drawing a small salary from the Society, Susan began touring the country and making speeches about the evils of slavery.

After Lincoln’s election as President in 1860, Anthony faced terrible opposition to her work against slavery—even in New York. But she didn’t give up or quit being an agitator.

In 1863 Anthony and Stanton formed the Women’s National Loyal League. In the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time, the League collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery and presented them to Congress.

That indefatigable work by Anthony and Stanton significantly assisted the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery in the U.S.

SBA: Agitator for Suffrage

The next fight was for the right for women, both black and white, to vote. In the early 1860s, white abolitionist men, such as William Lloyd Garrison, and black men, such as Frederick Douglass, were all for black men obtaining the right to vote. But they did not support the vote for women. Anthony and Stanton were outraged.

Anthony managed to register and even to vote in the election of 1872. She was subsequently arrested and convicted—but refused to pay her fine of $100 plus costs.

Even though she was a Quaker woman, in 1893 she exclaimed. “Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry!”

Anthony spent the last forty years of her long life working for women’s right to vote. Sadly, she never succeeded during her lifetime. But just a month before her death in 1906, she gave her last speech concluding with the rousing phrase, "Failure is impossible!”

Nicknamed the "Anthony Amendment" in honor of Susan, who had worked so long and so persistently, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was finally ratified on August 18, 1920.

Now, 100 years later, there will be far more women than men who will vote (and vote in the right way!) in the presidential election of 2020.

*****

In 2019, the city of Liberty (Mo.) where I live erected a life-size statue of Susan B. Anthony on the southeast corner of the historic square. Toward the end of their successful football season, she was sporting Chiefs’ apparel, as you see in the picture

.

Can Inhibition Do What Prohibition Couldn’t?

One hundred years ago on January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect. That amendment established the prohibition of “intoxicating liquors” in the nation—and initiated thirteen years of national turmoil.

The Long Road to Prohibition

The inimitable Ken Burns produced a three-part, six-hour documentary film series in 2011 under the title “Prohibition.” The first part is titled “A Nation of Drunkards,” and it begins with the more than ninety-year history of the road that led to Prohibition.

In 1826, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, preached six sermons on “intemperance,” as the drinking of alcoholic beverages was called then, and those sermons are still available in many places online (for example, see here).

Beecher (1775~1863) then co-founded the American Temperance Society that same year. That first anti-alcohol organization was followed by the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and the even more influential Anti-Saloon League in 1893.

Joining forces, the latter two nationwide organizations spurred the election in 1916 of the two-thirds majorities necessary in both houses of Congress to propose the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Prohibition Amendment

In the last half of 1917, the Senate voted 65-20 in favor of the 18^th Amendment, and that was followed by a 282-128 favorable vote in the House. Then it was sent to the states for ratification.

On January 16, 1919, the necessary 36^th state (out of 48) ratified the Amendment, which began,

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

So, the following year on Jan. 17, Prohibition went into effect—and this was the beginning of a period of increasing lawlessness in the country.

The second part of Ken Burns’s documentary is titled, “A Nation of Scofflaws.” Opposition to Prohibition led to rampant and flagrant violations of the law and resulted in a rapid rise of organized crime around the nation, such as typified by Chicago's Al Capone.

After only 13 years, the 18^th Amendment was repealed by the 21^st amendment which was proposed by Congress in February 1933 and was ratified by the requisite number of states that December.

For the most part, legalized Prohibition was a dismal failure.

What about Inhibition?

I am using “inhibition” here as explained in Encyclopedia Britannica: In psychology, inhibition means the “conscious or unconscious constraint or curtailment of a processor or behaviour, especially of impulses or desires. Inhibition serves necessary social functions, abating or preventing certain impulses from being acted on . . . .”

And I am suggesting that since legislation was so ineffective in curbing the consumption of alcoholic beverages, perhaps education leading to inhibition (= conscious constraint) may be what is necessary.

Statistics reported in 2018 indicated that there was a 67% decrease in smoking from 1965 to 2017. That was partly because of the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packages—and a general turning away from use of tobacco by society at large. Tobacco usage greatly decreased because of inhibition, not prohibition.

Why couldn’t, why shouldn’t the same thing happen with alcohol, a drug much more harmful than the nicotine in tobacco—as made clear in the following image of “drug harm” in The Economist last year? 

To some extent, it seems that the movement toward inhibition has already begun. According to an article in The Economist’s “The World in 2020,” there are signs that drinking is going out of style. The author avers that in a generation or two, drinking in rich countries could seem outdated. May it be so!

(I wrote about this same issue four years ago, and I encourage those of you who want to think more about this matter to read/re-read that article titled “The Case against ‘Demon Rum’”.)

"Let's Get Drunk!"

If you know me, you surely recognize that the words of the title are not mine. Rather, they are the words in a wonderful (pun intended) movie that was unnecessarily marred by those words.

Carl’s Recommendation

June and I have two fine grandsons (as well as five fine granddaughters). Carl Joseph Seat Daoust is our younger grandson, and we greatly enjoyed being with him and his parents last month in Tucson, Arizona, where they live.

Prior to our visit, Carl and his mother (Karen) read together the children’s novel Wonder (2012) by Raquel Jaramillo, who published her book under the pen name R.J. Palacio. They then saw the 2017 movie based on that novel.

Carl, who will turn 11 in August, was very favorably impressed by the book and the movie—and he highly recommended both. He also strongly suggested that we read the book before seeing the movie.

June did, but I failed to get that done before we watched the movie earlier this month. I greatly enjoyed the movie anyway.

Auggie’s Determination

The central character of “Wonder” is August, whom everyone calls Auggie. He is a boy just Carl’s age—but he was unfortunately born with serious facial deformities, which even multiple plastic surgeries were not able to fix very well. 

Auggie, who reportedly looks better in the movie than as he was portrayed in the novel.

Auggie has a good and supportive family: very loving, understanding parents and an outstanding big sister. His mother largely gives up her own work in order to help Auggie in his early years, and then she home-schools him. When he is ready for the fifth grade, they decide it is time for Auggie to start public school.

Fortunately, Auggie’s classroom teacher and school principal are very understanding and supportive. (I wish every kid could have as good a teacher as Mr. Browne and as wise a principal as Mr. Tushman.)

Unfortunately, Auggie experiences negative attitudes from most of the other kids at school—and most hurtful of all is the betrayal of the first friend he had among his classmates. But in spite of all the snubs, hurts, and active rejection, Auggie hangs in there with remarkable determination and fortitude.

My Consternation

Near the end of Auggie’s school year, his mother, admirably played by Julia Roberts, finally is able to finish her long-neglected master’s dissertation. When she shows the finished copy to her husband, he rejoices with her. That is when she exclaims, “Let’s get drunk!”

Why was that brief scene with those words inserted, for Pete’s sake?

It seems so unnecessary to have that line in such a heart-warming children’s movie. Why did the filmmakers want to leave the impression with the kids watching the movie that that is the way adults celebrate when they are happy?

Perhaps I am not qualified to write about getting drunk since I never did and never intend to. But I have seen the antics of drunk people, and, on occasion, have tried to engage in conversation with people who were drunk.

And I have known, and especially known of, people who killed themselves or were killed by others because of driving drunk. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation reports that in 2016 there were 10,497 “alcohol-impaired crash fatalities.”

That is more than 27 a day every day of the year—and a sizeable percentage of those were school-age kids. We are upset when 17 students get shot and killed–as, certainly, we should be. But that many die every week because of drunk drivers!

So why do some people think getting drunk is a great way to celebrate? And why should “Let’s get drunk!” be included in a heart-warming, inspiring children’s movie?

The Case against "Demon Rum"

Many of the great 19th-century women leaders in the U.S. were against what they considered three great evils: slavery, discrimination against women (including no voting rights), and alcohol. The first two evils have largely been eradicated. But not the third.

Jane Addams, the subject of my 9/5/15 blog article, was active in the temperance movement, as was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the main subject of my 11/10/15 article, and her close friend Susan B. Anthony.

One of the main 19^th century opponents of alcohol was Frances Willard. She is best known as the first national president of the Women’s Christian Temperance League, serving in that position from 1879 until her death in 1898.

In addition, Willard was a strong advocate of women’s suffrage, and her vision included federal aid to education, free school lunches, unions for workers, the eight-hour workday, work relief for the poor, municipal sanitation and boards of health, national transportation, strong anti-rape laws, protections against child abuse, etc.

Willard was a strong suffragette partly because she thought it would take women’s votes to pass laws against liquor. Consequently, fear that alcohol would become illegal was one of the reasons for much male opposition to giving women the right to vote.

In spite of women not being able to vote nationally, though, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol was ratified in January 1919 and went into effect a year later.  

Interestingly, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified 19 months later.

Last Dec. 22, 2015, the Washington Post published an article titled “Americans are drinking themselves to death at record rates.” According to that article, in 2014 “more than 30,700 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes,” a 35-year high.

Moreover, that number “excludes deaths from drunk driving, other accidents, and homicides committed under the influence of alcohol. If those numbers were included the annual toll of deaths directly or indirectly caused by alcohol would be closer to 90,000.”

From that and many other sources, it seems indisputable that the consumption of alcohol has a direct causal relationship to health problems, fatal and disabling accidents, homicides, domestic violence, rapes, and other negative issues, such as financial problems for those with limited means.

Of course, some will quickly say, “But that is only when alcohol is drunk excessively or irresponsibility.” While that is probably true, who ever starts drinking with the intention of doing so excessively (except maybe temporarily) or irresponsibly?

Proponents of stricter gun control repeatedly point out that guns cause some 33,000 deaths each year in this country. But if the figure of 90,000 deaths caused by alcohol is correct, guns are not nearly as much of a problem as alcohol is. Moreover, alcohol is a worldwide program.

Even though I am a strong advocate of greater gun control, perhaps the NRA and its friends are correct: it is not guns that kill people, it is people who kill people. Is that really any different from saying that alcohol does not cause problems, it is the people who use alcohol excessively or irresponsibly who cause problems?

What is the solution to the alcohol problem? Probably not more laws. But maybe a long-term educational program such as there has been against tobacco. The detrimental effects of tobacco has been widely disseminated, including in public schools. As a result, smoking in this country has decreased drastically.

No doubt the nineteenth-century women who were opposed to the three big problems of slavery, discrimination against women, and “demon rum” would be pleased if society now took the latter problem much more seriously.

Another Good Candidate for the New $10 Bill

A couple of months ago I suggested (here) that Jane Addams would be a good choice for the new $10 bill, which will have a woman’s picture on it. This article is about another woman who is also a strong candidate for the proposed new bill to be released in 2020.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an outstanding 19th-century woman who perhaps is not widely known today. But she was a woman of considerable ability and significance, so she certainly would not be a bad choice for the woman to appear on the new $10 bill.

Elizabeth Cady was born 200 years ago this week, on November 12, 1815. She died in 1902, less than three weeks before her 87^th birthday. Her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, was published five years before her death and tells much about her remarkable life.

At the time of her birth, Elizabeth’s father, a lawyer in New York, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As a young woman, discussing legal matters with her father and reading his law books caused Elizabeth to realize how disproportionately the law favored men over women—and particularly over married women.

Seeking to change such laws became one of her main goals in life.

In 1840, Elizabeth married Henry Stanton, a journalist who later studied law under his father-in-law and who also became a lawyer. The Stantons became the parents of seven children between 1842 and 1859.

In spite of having a large family—and she seems to have been a good mother—Elizabeth Stanton spent much of her life working for social causes. She was an abolitionist and also a very active member of the temperance movement, working against what she saw as the evils of alcohol.

But she became best known as a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.

Elizabeth’s first involvement in the women’s movement was in 1848. The Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, was held in July of that year. It was organized by Quaker women in Seneca Falls, New York, and by Elizabeth who was not a Quaker. (She and Henry had moved to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847.)

She was the main author of “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document presented to that convention. It includes these words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal” (emphasis added).

Elizabeth met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and they became lifelong friends and staunch colleagues in the women’s movement. (Anthony might be even a stronger candidate than Stanton for the new $10 bill, but her image already appears on the little-used one dollar coin, first minted in 1979.)

The Woman’s Bible is a two-part book written by Elizabeth and a committee of 26 women. The first volume was published in 1895, the year Elizabeth turned 80, and the second volume in 1898. It was written mainly to challenge the traditional position of religious orthodoxy that women should be subservient to men.

Elizabeth wrote the first essay, which was about Genesis 1:26-28. Her conclusion: “The above texts plainly show the simultaneous creation of man and woman, and their equal importance in the development of the race” (p. 8).

To this day most people seem to emphasize the second chapter of Genesis, where Eve is created from Adam’s rib and considered his “helpmeet” (from a misunderstanding of Genesis 2:20).

What a shame that so many today do not have as good an understanding of the Bible as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had 120 years ago!

Guns, Alcohol, Marijuana

The Super Bowl isn’t until this coming Sunday, but the longsuffering Kansas City Chiefs’ fans (of whom I am one) are already looking forward to next season. With a new coach (Andy Reid) and a new general manager (John Dorsey), Chiefs’ fans are trying to forget the past year by anticipating better things this fall.

But as terrible as the past season was on the field, it doesn’t match the tragedy last month of the murder-suicide by Jovan Belcher, the Chiefs’ player who killed his domestic partner and mother of his young daughter and then, a few hours later, killed himself in the presence of people high up in the Chiefs’ organization.

That tragedy spurred some public media commentators to write about the need for more stringent gun control. At the same time, others linked that tragic act of violence to alcohol. And, sure enough, when the autopsy report was released earlier this month, Belcher was found to have been legally drunk at the time of his death.

I have already written this month about the high number of murders caused by guns and the high number of deaths caused by drunk drivers. But alcohol is also linked to many of those murders as well. So, again, in order to save lives, there surely needs to be greater control of, or at least more responsible use of, both guns and alcohol.

At the present time, some politicians, beginning with the President, are making a concerted effort to pass meaningful control gun legislation, or at the very least to increase gun safety. But in spite of all the bad results that stem from drinking alcohol, as far as I know there is no new legislation about that problem being considered at all.

But what about marijuana? As most of you know, last November two states (Colorado and Washington) voted to make the recreational use of marijuana legal. (The medicinal use of marijuana had previously been legal in 18 states.) What should we think about such a change in public policy?

Let me be clear: I have never tried marijuana, and don’t intend to, legal or not. But it is my considered opinion that if alcohol is accepted by society as a legal drug, which it has been since 1933, then probably marijuana should be too. (That is certainly not true for meth, cocaine, heroin and other “hard drugs.”)

Marijuana does not seem to be as harmful as alcohol, and it is not as addictive as either alcohol or tobacco. In fact, the effects of marijuana may be far less detrimental to individuals and society than the effects of drinking alcohol or of smoking tobacco.

While certainly there should be laws against the use of marijuana before driving, the evidence seems to show that the rate of marijuana use to traffic accidents is far lower than the rate of drinking to traffic accidents. And there is a much lower rate of violent crimes related to marijuana than to alcohol.

In addition, decriminalizing marijuana would not only keep many young (and some older) people in the nation from becoming felons, it would also shift a tremendous amount of money from illicit drug merchants to tax revenues.

At any rate, I find it highly hypocritical for people who freely drink alcohol to be strongly opposed to the legalization of marijuana. While I would prefer for them both to be illegal, in reality probably they both should be legal.