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By Newsweek Editors
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"A Sanctuary Shooting" in our Sept. 27 issue, about the murder of seven people in a Ft. Worth, Texas, church, drew a passionate response. A number of letter writers called the incident an example of the growing persecution of Christians, and chided us for devoting only one page to it. But most were simply stunned and horrified. This particular mass murder, said one, "reached a new level of depravity." Another wrote: "Filling the airwaves and the Internet with extremist hatred and filling the hands and homes of angry, desperate people with guns can only lead to death." Unlike most NEWSWEEK stories about mass shootings, this one drew very few letters defending gun ownership.
The Cradle of Health
Your Sept. 27 cover story confirmed my long-held belief that many traits that tend to run in families have more to do with "family habits" than with genes ("Where Health Begins," Science & Technology). The same diet that affects the fetus will probably be fed to the child through its formative years. Thus the child's biography tends to become its biology. Thus the sins of the fathers (and mothers) are truly visited upon the sons (and daughters).
David A. Herndon
Houston, Texas
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I have spent the last 25 years agonizing over what I might have done to contribute to the birth defects that ultimately killed my daughter. Now I find out that physical problems my healthy sons may encounter later in life may be my fault as well. I can't get a break!
Jeri Ismert
Westminster, Colo.
My worst fear is that women are going to be blamed for all their children's health problems, and yet they have no support from our society to live their lives any differently when they are pregnant. We women are just human beings with stresses and faults, and we are carrying our own health problems and mental baggage. Now we are being told that our uteruses may hold the health of the human race. That sounds like an awfully important job for a woman who is already working three full-time jobs (wife, mother, employee) up until the moment she goes into labor.
Telaina Eriksen
Haslett, Mich.
Slaughter in Ft. Worth
As a gun owner, I was appalled to learn that Gov. George W. Bush had signed an amendment allowing a person to carry a firearm into church and requiring the church to post a sign if it wants to ban guns ("A Sanctuary Shooting," National Affairs, Sept. 27). What have we come to that we would dare to defile a place of worship because of the obsessive love affair Americans have with guns? If I could bring back one life lost in Ft. Worth by surrendering every gun I have, I would gladly do so. Gun ownership and the Second Amendment are not worth the loss of our youth.
William R. Morris
Baker, La.
Your one-page article on the slaughter of Christians in the Wedgwood Baptist Church expresses mystification about the gunman's motives. Yet you report his rhetoric at the shooting scene and the "anti-religious" writings found in his home, along with a family Bible that had been "methodically torn to pieces." I suspect that if the words and bullets had been directed at people of color or gays, the motive of hatred would have been shouted from the rooftops.
Laura Belcourt
St. Peter, Minn.
The Wrong Nightie
In your review of "The Trust" ("All of the Family's News," Business, Sept. 27), your reviewer seems to have scanned the book but not paid too much attention to detail. Writing about Adolph Ochs, the founding father, she says, "he grabbed at women all his life, including his new daughter-in-law, who spent a couple of nights in the Ochs home fleeing from him in her nightie." For the record, Adolph never had a son. His surrogate son was his nephew, Julius Ochs Adler, who, after he married, was ordered to live in the same house with his Uncle Adolph and Aunt Effie. The woman who fled in her nightie was Julius's wife, Babs, my mother.
Barbara Adler Katzander
New York, N.Y.
Governor Schwarzenegger?
In your Oct. 11 Perspectives section, my quote about "Just waiting for Miss Piggy, Kermit and Fozzie Bear" was a comment referring exclusively to president wanna-bes Cybill Shepherd and Warren Beatty--not to future political ambitions of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, I firmly believe Mr. Schwarzenegger could "Terminate" his Democratic competition for the California governorship in 2002. Besides, I've seen every one of his many box-office hits--and this is one guy I don't want to irritate.
Mark Pfeifle
Deputy Press Secretary Republican National Committee Washington, D.C.
BylinesA Welcome to Anna Quindlen
This week marks Anna Quindlen's debut as a columnist on NEWSWEEK's prestigious back page. The Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist and best-selling novelist succeeds the late Meg Greenfield, and will alternate with George Will.
In 1994, Quindlin left The New York Times, where she wrote the "Public and Private" op-ed column, to devote herself to fiction. Did she miss the journalistic wars in her five years away? "Sometimes I've had a faint hankering to write, " Quindlen says, "but not at the times you'd expect. I wasn't particularly interested in the sorry spectacle of the president and the intern. But occasionally I'd read a story about one of the subjects that perennially interest me - poverty, welfare reform, reproductive rights, the lives of women and people of color - and think that I could have made something of it."
Her new family at NEWSWEEK is sure she would have - and now will, for our readers.
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