Letters: Readers discuss Christianity, Trump at the VFW and support for Kris Kobach
Faithless?
You can hear the voices: “I’m saved. My anger is validated and amplified. The person I define as neighbor is loved. The person I define as Other is hated. The things that disgust me are bullied. The things that thrill me are defended with extreme righteousness. Religion I like is glorified. Religion I hate is vilified. The things that make me uneasy are pointed to as evil. The things I gravitate toward are held up to be holy.”
Question: Does your laser-like focus on what makes you happy and comfortable leave any room for looking at what you are doing to Christianity?
Christianity has declined precipitously in the United States after years of retrenchment in other parts of the developed world.
Satan’s work? Clearly. There is no chance that, in part, your own unthinking greed for appeasement and blind lust for a personal sense of well-being are driving away people (especially the young), as if with an unspared rod.
And so your self-serving hypocrisy deflects all challenges to your mind-blowingly convenient narratives as Christianity rots under your confidently smiling bulk.
Of course, you can easily dismiss this without any thought.
I just hope you haven’t made yourself so small that you will.
Tom Hall
Rea, Mo.
Wrong choice
I don’t think it was a great decision for The Star to print President Donald Trump’s Tuesday tweet about the Russians allegedly supporting the Democrats in the upcoming election as the “Tweet of the week.” (July 25, 14A) His propaganda on Twitter is more than enough.
We have entered an Orwellian or Stalin-like time in America. When the president was here in Kansas City last week for the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, he told people to not believe what they read or see because that’s not actually happening.
It reminded many of lines from George Orwell’s novel “1984”: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Jamie Tyroler
Kansas City
Get tougher
Once again, the well-meaning residents of Kansas City are pleading for a homicide-free weekend truce. Even if such a kumbaya solution happened to be successful for one week, what about the other 51 weeks?
To really reduce the runaway gun violence in our area, stiffer penalties must be imposed on the perpetrators. This would require changes in gun-crime penalties and more prison cells to incarcerate violent offenders.
Examine the “Use a gun and you’re done” law in California that makes individuals think twice before using a gun and throwing away many prime years of their lives in prison.
The penalties are in addition to the underlying convictions and must be completely served without parole.
Take a look at the full provisions and penalties, and you will see one reason California has reduced gun crimes.
John S. Savella Jr.
Overland Park
Get beyond it
I thought Hugh Hefner was dead. How a commander-in-chief can badger Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal is beyond belief. (July 26, 10A, “Trump lashes out at Cohen over recording”)
I don’t totally buy the script that our country has been or is currently an asylum for relentless greed.
Can we just transcend fake news and examine the facts? May the Justice Department prevail and look to the better angels of our nature.
After all, we can all still vote. And so it goes.
Robert Hendrickson
Kansas City
Kobach will fight
If there is one thing we’ve seen in our country it is that we need leaders who are leaders — leaders who will fight for their constituents and who are willing to shake up the establishment.
President Donald Trump is one of those leaders, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is one of those leaders as well. This isn’t a surprise because Kobach was an early supporter of Trump, and he has become an adviser to the president on immigration issues. It should come as no shock then that Kobach fights for Kansas just as Trump fights for America.
Kobach is a consistent conservative who has fought illegal immigration, protected our election process, stood up to those who wanted a desecrated American flag to hang on a public university campus and cut his office budget.
As governor, he has promised he would end in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, cut taxes, solve our state spending problem, put education money into the classroom, protect our Second Amendment rights and make Kansas the most pro-life state in the country.
Kris Kobach will do all of this because he fights for Kansans. That’s why I am voting for him.
David Soph
Topeka