Regarding Ramesh Ponnuru’s May 15 Friday Opinion column, “A rift deepens between Pope Leo and the White House”:
President Donald Trump subscribes to a teleological moral code in which the rightness or wrongness of an act depends on the consequences of the act. If the war against Islamists in Iran will deter their quest for nuclear weapons that could hold the West hostage, then it is morally correct.
Pope Leo XIV subscribes to a deontological moral code in which the act itself, not its consequences, is either right or wrong. The pope seems comparatively unconcerned with distinctions of great-power policy or whether Israel would be targeted for destruction if Iran marshaled atomic bombs to its hatred of the Jewish state.
The ongoing task for Secretary of State Marco Rubio is to discern a path through the moral tangle so that the two schools of belief are not mutually exclusive and the prayers of consequentialists will be heard.
Paul Bloustein, Cincinnati
Christianity, a fifth wheel
The May 18 front-page article “National Mall meets Sunday service” reported on the taxpayer-funded “Rededicate 250″ event reenvisioning of the role of Christianity in the founding of our nation. The article quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio as saying that civilizations before Christianity saw history as a “wheel to nowhere,” whatever that means, but Christianity is the “soul of our nation.” Historically, that’s hard to understand. Christianity became a major religion in part by wiping out the great Greco-Roman civilization, bringing on the Dark Ages. Fortunately, in the later Middle Ages, spurred especially by Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Jewish scholars, Christianity rediscovered what Edgar Allan Poe termed “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” Thus, post-Renaissance Christianity became an amalgam civilization with the same “wheel to somewhere” as the other Abrahamic religions. That probably seemed appropriate to our nominally Christian but often deist Founding Fathers.
Paul H. Blackman, Falls Church
Fix gerrymandering by adding one letter to it
In his May 14 column, “Who will win the House? The scales are shifting.,” Henry Olsen wrote that Democrats will be angry in November if, thanks to recent court decisions regarding redistricting, “they win the national popular vote by a large margin but don’t capture the House majority.”
If the New York Giants beat the Dallas Cowboys 77-23 in the Super Bowl, could Dallas claim rights to the Lombardi Trophy? It is possible to win just 23 percent of the popular vote and still garner sufficient electoral college votes to claim the presidency. This system could lead a candidate to request, say, that partisans just “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia. This system could also spur a candidate to suggest, “We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats … and we are entitled to five more seats.” That, too, could affect who is president in addition to the composition of the House of Representatives. Hence the increasing fights over redistricting and America’s Picasso-like district maps.
There is an alternative to gerrymandering. Call it gerrymeandering.
Gerrymeandering suggests the following: one representative for every 1 million Americans. The map of congressional districts would be tantamount to an AI response to this request: “Provide a sample map of the United States with, instead of 50 states, 343 states, each with about 1 million residents, minimizing the perimeter of each state as much as possible.” Every 10 years, as the population changes, so, too, will the number of districts and their shapes. Gerrymeandering is similar to our current system, but without the avant-garde maps, without gaming the system, without the internecine partisan wars and (with apologies to Cowboys fans) without losers claiming victory.
Michael Baron, Corrales, New Mexico
Bowser could give D.C. children a parting gift
The May 18 editorial “Why are so many states leaving free money on the table for education?” rightly called for state leaders to opt in to the new federal scholarship tax credit program. The same call applies here in D.C.
Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth researchers recently found that D.C. students ranked first in the nation in both reading and math recovery following the pandemic. But many at-risk students still stand to benefit from extra support. More than half of the city’s economically disadvantaged eighth-graders scored “below basic” in reading on the 2024 national assessment.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has a historic opportunity to act before her term ends. The District has long been a national model for expanding parental choice in education. Nearly half of D.C. students attend public charter schools. Thousands of children have used federally funded opportunity scholarships to attend private schools. These options are popular with parents, and opting in to the new program would build upon these successful reforms.
The mayor has the authority to set guidelines for the scholarship-granting organizations that will receive donations through the tax credit program. She could prioritize nonprofits that use funds to provide scholarships and tutoring to children from low-income households, students with disabilities and others who need extra help.
Democratic governors in Colorado and New York have already chosen to opt in. Arne Duncan, who was education secretary under President Barack Obama, called the decision a “no-brainer” in a Post op-ed last year. For Bowser, it’s an opportunity to cement a lasting legacy for D.C.’s disadvantaged students.
Dan Lips, Washington
The writer is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
The truth about teaching
After the May 15 editorial “Janeese Lewis George’s half-baked plan for D.C. schools,” yet another stereotypical attack on unions, Post readers should hear from the other side.
In the 1970s, I was raising two children on my teacher’s salary alone. It was challenging, but I managed to buy a modest two-bedroom condo in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Thus, I had some control over the cost of housing, as opposed to being at the mercy of landlords, who weren’t eager to rent to single mothers in those days. I carried some credit card debt, as my salary did not quite stretch to meet the costs of car repairs and dental bills, but my little family had good health benefits, dependable transportation and enough discretionary income so that my children could participate in sports and other community activities. I was asked more than once how I was able to do all this on a teacher’s salary.
The answer is that I was a member of a strong union. There were and are people who feel that I didn’t deserve that lifestyle. “That’s taxpayers’ money,” they said. Of course it was. But my union fought for its members’ dignity and security. I have never regretted paying those union dues, nor into the pension fund for which the union bargained. I suspect that nonunion staff in my school system who complained about having to pay the lesser “check off” dues are quite happy to have their pensions and health benefits.
Lynn Kearney, Arlington
Better together
In his May 14 Thursday Opinion column, “The most surprising advice my father gave me,” Theodore R. Johnson passed along something his dad said when dropping him off at college his freshman year: “Go places by yourself. Don’t be afraid to go alone.” Johnson asserted that a willingness to do hard work on your own is a fundamental trait that will get you far.
I believe in the importance of having courage to face things alone. I usually complete work independently. I think I can get things done quicker when I do them by myself. I have better focus and don’t have to deal with group dynamics. But as the saying goes: “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” Going to college is about finding your people, not just working hard. To thrive, we must strike a balance between inward determination and an openness to collaborate. Success isn’t measured only by how far we can get on our own, but also by what we can achieve together.
Patricia Chang, Fairfax
Post Opinions wants to know: In the May 10 letters package “Mother knows best,” readers shared sayings from their mothers that have stayed with them into adulthood. Now, it’s dads’ turn. What unforgettable things did your father say? Share your response, and it might be published as a letter to the editor. wapo.st/father_knows_best
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