Shirley Swafford wrote a letter to the editor in Sunday's Nevada Appeal. The title was "Nevadans don't need to spread more hate." Ms. Swafford is offended at the efforts of the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage to gain signatures for their petition to limit legal marriages to only heterosexual couples. She berates the 121,499 signers of the petition who she accuses of teaching their children to hate.
The marriage contract was meant to create a legal relationship between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a stable family unit. This legal relationship provided for duties and responsibilities between each of them and to their children. It was thought, and rightly so, that the purpose of the marriage contract was to raise the next generation in a secure and nurturing environment.
It was thought that children raised in a secure and nurturing environment and educated to become contributing members of civilized society was absolutely necessary to maintain a free society of limited government. They realized that self government was impossible without the self discipline of the population.
In Ms. Swafford's opinion, people who think this way are "haters" and are teaching their children hatred. Her opinion is exactly the opinion those who are destroying this country want to instill in a brain-washed public. The destroyers are fully aware that a stable family who nurture and educate their children are an impediment to their desire to reduce the population to mindless sheep.
The destroyers know that if they can change the meaning and purpose of the marriage contract, they can eventually destroy the whole idea of marriage. If the original meaning and purpose can be changed to include purposes and meanings that were never originally intended, the institution can be destroyed.
These changes and additions can then be used to bring about twisted interpretations in court rulings that will destroy the original purpose of the marriage contract. The standard procedure in courts today is for clever lawyers to use the letter of the law to destroy the spirit of the law by parsing and changing the meanings of words.
Recent examples of this are Clinton's problem with the word "is" and Gore is having a problem with the meaning of the word "raised" when explaining the Communist Chinese money he took at a Buddhist temple fund raiser. It seems he was the only one in the country who didn't know it was a fund raiser. Closer to home, a Nevada Appeal columnist, also a lawyer, displayed problems with the meaning of "people" and "shall not be infringed" in a recent column.
ALAN C. EDWARDS
Carson City