Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 129, No. 4, Ed. 1 Tuesday, September 4, 2018 Page: 4 of 10
ten pages : ill.View a full description of this newspaper.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
4 - TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
TODAY'S EDITORIAL CARTOON
Back to the 'Latter-
G
1
George Will
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Have something to say about what's happening in the news?
Say it with a letter to the editor.
Email your letter to editor@gainesvilleregister.com. All letters are subject to editing for clarity and length. One letter per writer
will be published in the same week. All letters must contain a physical address and daytime phone number. Only names and
hometown will be published.
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
WHAT ROHINGYA
GENOCIDE ?
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@ whitehouse, gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068 , Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, 940-898-0331
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
prior Terry Mattingly
MYAN^
z/X^
AtJI/REWS n',piEe1,
A®
Final queries for Judge Kavanaugh
Four decades ago, New York Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, an intellectual Democrat, observed with
amazement and regret that Republicans had become
the party of ideas. Today, many of America’s most
interesting arguments divide conservatives. One W
concerns the judiciary’s role in the supervision
of democracy: Should judges be, as Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Robert Bork believed,
deferential to majorities, or should judges be
engaged in limiting majorities in the name of
liberty? Another intramural conservative
debate is whether “originalism” is sufficient
as a method of construing the Constitution. So,
Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate interrogators might usefully
ask:
“Originalists” say the text should be construed by
discerning the public meaning of its words when they
were written. The 1866 Congress that drafted the
14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection
of the law” continued to fund racially segregated
schools in the District of Columbia, which Congress
controlled. Yet the 1954 Brown decision held that
segregation violated that guarantee.
Can originalists defend the court’s
reasoning in Brown? How might the
court have better reached the Brown
result?
When the 14th Amendment
was ratified, 32 of the 37 states
had laws criminalizing sodomy.
Can originalists defend the court’s
2003 ruling that such laws violate
this amendment’s “due process”
guarantee?
The Eighth Amendment proscribes
“cruel and unusual” punishments.
But punishments contemporaneous
with the ratification of this
amendment included branding,
pillorying, whipping and mutilation.
Would originalism allow these?
Holmes said: “I don’t care what [the
Constitution’s Framers’] intention
was. I only want to know what the
words mean.” But can the meaning of
words be severed from the intentions
of those who use them?
Abraham Lincoln said the
Declaration of Independence is the
“apple of gold” that is “framed” by
something “silver”: the Constitution. Silver is less
precious than gold; frames serve what they frame. Do
you believe that the Constitution’s authors intended
their words to advance what the Declaration began —
the securing of natural rights? Do you agree (as the
Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Sandefur argues) that
the Declaration is logically as well as chronologically
prior to the Constitution: The Declaration “sets the
framework for reading” the Constitution as a charter
for government “instituted” to “secure” pre-existing
rights?
When the First Congress debated what became the
Bill of Rights, a member questioned why the drafters
enumerated only certain rights. Massachusetts Rep.
Theodore Sedgwick replied: “They might have gone
into a very lengthy enumeration of rights; they
might have declared that a man should have
jH a right to wear his hat if he pleased; that he
BW might get up when he pleased, and go to bed
flr when he thought proper, but [I] would ask the
■. gentleman whether he thought it necessary to
flg>a enter these trifles in a declaration of rights,
under a government where none of them were
intended to be infringed.” By what principles
do you determine what rights are neither
trifles nor enumerated?
Justice Clarence Thomas says, “We as a nation
adopted a written Constitution precisely because it
has a fixed meaning that does not change.” Can you
cite an important constitutional provision (certainly
not the regulation of interstate commerce, or the
establishment of religion, or government taking
private property for “public use,” or the prohibition
of “cruel and unusual punishments”) the meaning of
which today is the same as the public
meaning when the provision was
rpoday, many of ratified?
A . , . Bork said the central problem of
America S most constitutional law” is: “Our political
interesting arguments ethos is majoritarian, but the Supreme
divide conservatives.
One concerns the
judiciary’s role in
the supervision of
democracy: Should
judges be, as Oliver
Wendell Holmes
and Robert Bork
believed, deferential to
majorities, or should
judges be engaged in
limiting majorities in
the name of liberty?
Court, with the power to strike
down laws democratically enacted,
is counter-majoritarian.” Others,
however, say that majority rule is a
process; the purpose of America’s
collective existence is an outcome, a
condition: liberty, which the process
can threaten. What say you?
Sandefur argues that the Fifth and
14th Amendments’ guarantees of
“due process of law” are not purely
about process. Rather, the adjective
“due” modifies the noun “process”
by giving it the following substance:
Due process produces an outcome
that is not arbitrary as measured by
criteria inherent in the concept of law
— generality, fairness and rationality
understood as a cost-efficient means to
a legitimate government end.
Finally, University of Chicago
and New York University professor
Richard Epstein says the Constitution’s architecture
— separation of powers, checks and balances,
federalism, guarantees of individual rights — implies a
“presumption of error”: The architecture intentionally
slows the political process because government
interventions in society’s spontaneous order are
presumptively of dubious legitimacy because
government is presumed to be not disinterested but
serving factional interests, or its own. Discuss.
George F. Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. Reach
him at georgewill@washpost.com.
/ UN
^3
day Saints'future
No doubt about it: New York press lord Horace
Greeley interviewing religious pioneer Brigham
Young in 1859 was a face-off between giants.
One of the issues they discussed is suddenly
back in the news: Should outsiders use the word
“Mormon” to describe members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
Greeley asked Young: “Am I to regard Mormonism
(so-called) as a new religion, or as simply a new
development of Christianity?”
The faith’s second “prophet, seer and revelator”
insisted that there is “no true Christian
Church without a priesthood directly
commissioned by and in immediate [ M
communication with the Son of ! JBll
God and Savior of mankind. Such | WtWB
a church is that of the Latter-day
Saints, called by their enemies
Mormons.”
In recent decades, LDS leaders
have made several attempts —
to the 2002 Winter Olympics in
Utah, for example — to distance themselves from
the M-word. Now, the church’s president has made
another appeal for journalists, and everyone else, to
avoid “Mormon” when referring to members of his
church. To be blunt, he said he’s on a mission from
God.
“The Lord has impressed upon my mind the
importance of the name He has revealed for His
Church, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints,” wrote President Russell M. Nelson,
repeating a message he voiced decades before
reaching the top office. “We have work before us to
bring ourselves in harmony with His will.”
The church’s new journalism style guide
proclaims: “Please avoid using the abbreviation
‘LDS’ or the nickname ‘Mormon’ as substitutes for
the name of the Church, as in ‘Mormon Church,’
‘LDS Church,’ or ‘Church of the Latter-day Saints.’
When referring to Church members, the terms
‘members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints’ or ‘Latter-day Saints’ are preferred.”
Writers needing a shorter name are asked to
use “the Church,” the “Church of Jesus Christ” or
the “restored Church of Jesus Christ.” The word
“Mormon” will continue to appear in proper nouns
such as “The Book of Mormon,” the “Mormon Trail”
and perhaps even “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”
Church-media staffers have “jumped to attention,”
said Joel Campbell, a journalism professor at
Brigham Young University. However, church leaders
face the challenge of convincing scribes at the
Associated Press, and elsewhere, to alter the bible
used in most mainstream newsrooms.
Currently, the Associated Press Stylebook
recommends: “Mormon Church — Acceptable in all
references for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, but always include the full name in a story
dealing primarily with church activities.”
Campbell said it will be especially hard for editors
to accept a capital “C” second reference to “the
Church,” which implies a claim of “some primacy
among churches.” Meanwhile, headline writers
— when using big, bold, type — will find it all but
impossible to use a name with eight words and one
hyphen.
The “Flunking Sainthood” columnist at Religion
News Service has her doubts, too. It is strange,
noted Jana Riess, that a “church that invested
millions in its ‘Meet the Mormons’ movie and
exports its Mormon Tabernacle Choir as its
ambassador to the world asked us all to stop using
the word ‘Mormon.’
“Ahem. It seems I’m no longer a Mormon
columnist,” Riess continued. “I’m a Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints columnist, and isn’t
that just so fun to say?... I didn’t realize when I
was co-authoring ‘Mormonism for Dummies’ years
ago that the correct title should be ‘The Restored
Gospel of Jesus Christ for Dummies, Which Is Not
Actually Mormonism, Because Mormonism Is Now
Considered An Inaccurate Term to Describe Our
Religious History and Beliefs, Despite Every Google
Search You’ve Ever Conducted About Us.’”
A decade ago, said Campbell, he researched
20 years of official church “branding efforts” in
digital mass media and concluded — in the age of
“search engine optimization” — that “Mormon”
was around forever, especially at Mormon.org and
Mormonnewsroom.org. Also, LDS.org is alive and
well.
“What our leaders are saying is that this is not a
name change — it’s a correction. We’ve fallen short
of using the name God gave us,” said Campbell.
“Then again, we copyrighted the name ‘Mormon’
not that long ago to keep people from abusing it....
This is complicated stuff, and it will take a long time
to sort it all out.”
Terry Mattingly is the editor ofGetReligion.org and Senior Fellow for
Media and Religion at The King's College in New York City. He lives in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee.
BE SIPEG,IT’S AN
INTERNAL MATTER.
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Newspaper.
Einselen, Sarah. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 129, No. 4, Ed. 1 Tuesday, September 4, 2018, newspaper, September 4, 2018; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1324309/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cooke County Library.