GOP Takeover of Congress

Re “Let’s Look at the Real Newt Gingrich,” Column Left, Nov. 27:

Robert Scheer’s column ignores a very important point. The recent election was not about people and personalities, it was about issues and ideas. The Republicans won because they promised to enforce the laws, create a more cost-effective government and reduce the interference of the federal government in the lives of people. The Republicans did not win by focusing on the extramarital and financial affairs of the President.

The United States is still a country of independent, self-reliant individuals who provide leadership in all walks of life at all levels of society. If the leaders in the more visible positions of government prove to lack the integrity to do what they have promised to do, in due time they will be replaced.

SCOTT WORMAN

Encinitas

* Paige Gold’s insightful column (“Today’s GOP Isn’t Looking So Grand to Its Women,” Commentary, Nov. 25) speaks for millions of mainstream Republicans, former Republicans, and would-be/should-be Republicans, especially women, who have been ignored and abandoned by party leaders eager to please the radical religious right. This Trojan horse, as she so accurately terms these Republican Party newcomers, had already been welcomed into the party by leaders who have displayed a disturbing tendency to support the right’s efforts to mix religion and politics with issues such as organized classroom prayer and stringent anti-abortion laws.

November’s election was a referendum on the size and role of government, and not on a particular narrow social agenda. Mainstream Americans, especially including women, and basic Republican tenets, such as individual liberty and personal freedom, must not be written off for short-term, politically expedient purposes if the Republican Party wishes to maintain electoral control for more than just the next two years.

KARLA D. HENDERLONG

Dublin, Calif.

* If taken as directed, Guy Molyneux’s prescription for the Democrats (“12-Step Program for Recovering Democrats,” Opinion, Dec. 4) should prove more tranquilizer than tonic. Democratic blindness to governmental voraciousness and self-interest lost them the recent elections, not badly run campaigns, as he imputes.

If Newt Gingrich talks about orphanages, what better policy initiatives have the Democrats to offer that aren’t more of the same expensive, broken, big-government solutions? While they bash lower capital gains taxes as “coddling the rich,” don’t high capital gains taxes hurt pensioners too? Don’t paranoiac wetlands regulations excessively burden not only business but small landowners? Democrats, cut off from the world outside the beltway, have no way of knowing. Molyneux is himself in denial.

ROBERT McMILLIN

Garden Grove

* I suppose Gingrich thinks he’s taking a bold stance by recommending “toleration” of gays and lesbians to his conservative colleagues (Nov. 24). His words, however, demonstrate the roots of the radical right’s obsession with gay and lesbian people: fear and ignorance.

While “toleration” is certainly better than the annihilation preached by Gingrich’s party at the 1992 Republican National Convention, it fails to live up to the promise of democracy. “Toleration” is no more acceptable to those with another sexual orientation than it is to those with another skin color or another nationality. If Gingrich merely “tolerates” his lesbian sister, then perhaps he needs some lessons on what family values really mean.

His comparison of homosexuality, an innate orientation, to the disease of alcoholism and his belief that gay and lesbian people “practice” homosexuality further indicate his complete ignorance of who gay and lesbian people are. Until equal rights are granted to all, we will be there to educate Gingrich and his colleagues on who we really are.

LORRI L. JEAN, Executive Director

Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian

Community Services Center

* Re “Doesn’t Anybody Like California?” editorial, Nov. 19:

As a Republican, I would like to express my disappointment with Gingrich. Gingrich should learn to think before he speaks and before he acts. The Republicans have an opportunity for the first time in 40 years to really make a difference. With carefully chosen words and actions the Republican Party can once again rise to the current challenges facing our great nation. If the party is smart, leaders must be thinking about bringing the party back to the center so as to pull in the “Reagan Democrats” that the party needs to win the upcoming presidential election. However, with big-mouth, non-thinking leadership in Congress it could severely undermine the agenda of the Republican Party.

DIANE KENNEDY

Granada Hills