Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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"ISaiiUcock Serving USC Since 190S J.T. Wagenheim, Editor in Chief Lee Clontz, Viewpoints Editor Editorial Board Wendy Hudson, Carson Henderson, Gordon Mantler, Nancy Salomonsky, Tony Santori Derision Supreme Court extension of racketeering law protects abortion clinics from terrorism In a unanimous decision Monday, the Supreme Court agreed that abortion clinics can use the Racketeer Influenced, Corrupt Organizations Act to combat militant anti-abortion protesters. Under the new interpretation of RICO, clinics that successfully sue anti-abortion groups and individuals for their malicious conduct can be awarded triple the actual damages. The law also stipulates that leaders of anti-abortion groups can be sued as conspirators to crimes even if they weren't present when the activities occurred. The law is long overdue for abortion clinics, which are in growing need of protection because of the increasing militancy of many antiabortion groups, including Operation Rescue. The 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, a physician who performed abortions, coupled with abortion clinic bombings that have been going on for years, have seriously threatened the ability of clinics to continue to perform a service that is, whether the anti-abortionists like it, legal. Anti-abortion protesters claim it's their right to picket abortion clinics and harass potential patients. While their right to protest is protected, they must understand where the lines are drawn. Their strong-arm tactics only serve to torment women who have already made an extremely difficult decision: to have an abortion. Antiabortion protesters must realize that holding up pictures of aborted fetuses and taunting women won't further their cause. Rather, it makes their position appear radical, and they seem to be raving zealots. RICO doesn't outlaw peaceful protests, but any criminal activity involved in protests, such as arson, firebombing or property damage, is far more costly for anti-abortion organizations if their members are convicted Operation Rescue, for instance, already has hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that it claims to be unable to pay. One would hope that its leaders won't jeopardize the very existence of the organization by continuing to participate in such costly activities. The law, far from preventing anti-abortion protesters their right to protest, helps protect the clinics that are performing a service that is, ultimately, legal. Abstinence-based education way to prevent pregnancy The year is 1994. It's nearly ^ three decades after the so-called Sexual Revolution. Teen-age pregnancy rates are v out of control, the number of IjMlr babies bom out of wedlock and jfepEV the number of abortions per- JHk formed as a method of birth con trol continues to rise, and AIDS TnmmvTrairhfvrrv continues to kill more teen-agers UJlIllAl^Afc^ and young adults. These are the startling facts that columnist now face our society. As a result, middle-class have been put up in schools, and America has begun to question billboards along highways are proour government and our schools, moting abstinence to young people. School boards all over the United Since the program began two States are beginning to examine years ago, teen-age pregnancy their sex education curriculums, rates have declined 10 percent, including Jacksonville, Los Another example is the Southern Angeles, New York and even Baptist Church program "True South Carolina. Love Waits," which has also been Recently, the S.C. Board of adopted by other churches such as Education adopted new textbooks the ELCA (Lutheran) and the that emphasized abstinence rather Church of Christ, than contraception. Most research Although the basic principles of indicates that the parents of S.C. abstinence have always been taught students want this tvoe of curricu- in these churches and others such lum. as the Catholic Church, this is a Yet, there's the usual opposi- much more active campaign, tion by liberal groups such as The statistics bear the results. Planned Parenthood and the Take the Southern Baptists, for American Civil Liberties Union, example. Research indicates, They claim "Teen-agers are going according to the Christian Index, to have sex, period," and they say that a Southern Baptist is 10 "Abstinence is unrealistic in times more likely than the avertoday's society." age American to wait until marFirst of all, how could anyone riage to have sex. That means that give up on their own children, a Southern Baptist is at least 10 You have to try to teach them times more likely to avoid AIDS, between right and wrong and how pregnancy out of wedlock and the to protect themselves. Second, issue of abortion altogether, evidence clearly shows a direct I could go on with examples correlation between abstinence illustrating this point, but it seems education and lower premarital to me to be irrefutable. According sex rates. to the Los Angeles Times, even In reference to my first the L.A. school board has finally assumption, when I say we have realized there probably exists a to teach children how to protect correlation between liberal sex-ed themselves, I mean abstinence, programs and the rise in teen-age not contraception. Condoms have pregnancy rates, been shown to have nearly a 20 Nonetheless, as long as liberal percent failure rate. This tells me groups and the Clinton administhe only safe sex for unmarried tration continue to actively supteen-agers mid young adults is no port the twisted logic of contrasex at all. * ceptive-based education, they will In reference to my second continue to deny reality. The realassumption, abstinence education ity is, abstinence-based education programs have been quite effective, works better than any other proFor instance, in Maryland, signs gram ever created. xt nix Chris Carroll ^Qiy ^ _L News: 777-7726 Cootdiiialor of Student Media ihSairrrrnrR Advertising: 777-4249 Laura Day ttl I I vCU Cl\ FAX: 777-6482 Production Manager Student Media Russell House-USO Columbia, SC 29208 ^'m Green AM. Production Manager J.T. Wagenheim Nancy Salomonsky Darby Lackey Gregory Perez Editor in Chief Carolina! Editor _ Asst. News Production Asst. Lee Clontz Tony Santori Brian McGuire Viewpoints Editor Sports Editor Melissa Tennen Graduate Asst. Carson Henderson David Mandrell Asst. Carolina! Renee Gibson Copy Desk Chief _ Photo Editor Jimmy Debutts Advertising Manager Gordon Manlier Chris Muldrow Ajs| s j Taylor Rutland Copy Desk Chief Graphics Editor . Asa. Advertising Manager Wendy Hudson Nora Doyle Paul Jon Boscacci Erik Collins News Editor As?' News Cartoonist FlcuUy Advisor The Gamecock is the student newspaper of the Letters Policy University of South Carolina and is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semes- T"1* Gamecock will try to print all letters received, ters, with the exception of university holidays and exam Letters should be 200-250 words and must include full Periods name, professional title or year and major if a student. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the Letters must be personally delivered by the author to SouUiCarobnah0r 'hOSe ?f U VCrsity of The Gamecock newsroom in Russell House room 321. The Board of Student Publications and Communications ^ Gamecock reserves the right to edit all letters for is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of style, possible libel or space limitations. Names will not Student Media is its parent organization. be withheld under any circumstances. Viewpoi Vx-:#,.. -Wk^ f^ , W*$8&. '^W* f I WMWf ' ' .vtt. >X'XW>XyV.vly I . . ^ I You 6 Mi^ nifel f "Although it's quite acceptable f lunatic Texas billionaires, it's coi our nation's capital thir Macintosh goo This weekend marks the 10th anniversary ol the first commercial for the Macintosh, which appeared during the 1984 Super Bowl. The highly lauded advertisement featured a woman, clad in skimpy shorts, running through a post-apocalyptic world and playing hammertoss with a gigantic television screen showing a Big Brother-type preaching to a room full ol mindless clones. The tagline of the ad was something like: You'll see why 1984 (the year) won't be like "1984." All of which was to imply that the Macintosh would cause a revolution in computers. And surprise, it did. Kind of. The Macintosh was Apple's bombshell against an IBM-dominated personal-computer market. IBM was, dare I stretch the metaphor too far, the Big Brother figure and Apple is, presumably, the skimpily dressed Olympian. Weird, but good advertising. The first Macintoshes sold out very quickly. Since then, they've done moderately well. They have a fairly healthy 10 percent of the personal computer market. But they've done one horrible thing to the world. They've made people dumber. In addressing that, let's accept that a computer is a tool. Nothing more. It can be used for fun and games or for work, but it is a tool to be used with an end in mind. Now when you turn a "Mac" on, you get a smiley-faced drawing of the computer while the machine "wakes up" or whatever else it does during that limbo time between when you turn Citadel offers diversity type J ions and < to higher education cease to e restrictions To the editor: ceming div I just finished reading your So now "Courage" editorial on the Jan. 21 publicly 1 Viewpoints page. My concern is excludes v your lack of information on The The Citade Citadel's stand against women its funding attending classes and joining the public scl corps. In essence, I want to show time, stud your readers how our fight to Converse c remain a single-gender institution ey in the fc is not, as your article says, based taking in i solely on time-honored tradition. schools ha> The Citadel is not anti-female, the state's i Rather, The Citadel believes in the lie educatio value of single-gender education, Across t which in South Carolina means are 85 won diversity in the state's educational to four mai system. Speaking on the Platonic which are level, if we all received the same during the What is tl E"It's a little separate, but I your friends are. But I think little bit of separatism at the t "I don't pay much attention ti I don't have any problem wh; whole campus goes, I really < tion. Physic nts ( .When Wium* $en$eie$$ < ( cea$6 in Our piseok-map V Mow on we protect c r?ct" I am l I out to buy <0**46? J I A P<$1?C?. Jg or people to blindly worship sports figui isidered rather perverse to admire and r< lk that wacky fun is incompatible with s The Geor; d news for moro VIEWPOINTS EDITOR ^ it on and when you can actually use it. 1 Just as an aside, I heard an alternate definition ^ of Macintosh: Machine Always Crashes, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. Sorry, couldn't ^ resist. A ... ?- . C /Anyway, aner me macnine nres up you gei to navigate the Mac's "desktop," which consists of folders which contain folders which contain a yet more folders which, you hope, eventually f] contain the file you're looking for. The problem is, you can be yanking that a mouse around, clicking and double-clicking for 0 hours before you actually find something you l< need. When you finally find the file, you get, n surprise, a cute picture on which to click. Please. ^ Consider other tools like, say a car engine or a Craftsman SkilSaw. They aren't cute. They're ^ ugly and mean-looking, like tools should be. P They don't smile when you turn them on. They ^ screech and belch smoke. That's what a com- h puter should do. That's what IBMs do. v Install something on a Mac. You plug it into & the port with the corresponding picture. For instance, if you want to plug in a modem to go tl into your phone, you plug it into the port with the picture that looks like a phone. We're talk- T jcation, new ideas, opin- the members of the Leg :auses in society would showed overwhelming sup Kist. I do not recall any the existence of The Citad in the Constitution con- gle-gender status. South < ersity. provides diversity of edua the question is whether its citizens as well as for funding a school that zens of the country. /omen is constitutional. A lot of people do not 1 receives 29 percent of that if The Citadel loses th from the state. It is a Columbia and Converse v 100I. But at the same also. When I think about it, ents at Columbia and we will all lose. The pui olleges receive tax mon- destruction of diversity in , >rm of tuition grants. By is analogous to the destrw tax dollars, the private America and the diverse o /e become extensions of ideas and causes of those v educational design, pub- ated America. >n. I think Faulkner's joke, he United States, there if I could get in," snov len's colleges compared before she had a chance to le colleges, only two of I consider myself fortunati Dllhlir Rv rpsnlnfion am not a nnnrvpt PAn trnl la/i I j m vw ' " I' VWIIU VHVU 1993 legislative session, strings of a lawyer who ie state of race relations a think it depends who "I think tl you can always see a ' ter than o ictivities you go to." problems, Laurie Wise lhe pasL o it really. Personally, I 5 "I feel tl itsoever. As far as the \jjshould be lon't pay much atten- issue. I dc Mark McCloskey * mm :al education sophomore ( bun Violence j py ^octery?/ J KiRSetveS^ J| res, marginally talented actors or espect political heroes... Many in ;trong political beliefs." ge Stephanopolous fan club newsletter ns, lazy people ng moron magic here. To connect one to an IBM, you've got to >pen the case. There's no little picture. There ire a bunch of slots with orange, deadly wires, ill of which look like they should be left alone, rhen you reluctantly ram in your modem or canner or whatnot, and you hope to God that he machine doesn't burst into flames when you dug it back in. My computer at home is a mean, nasty IBM ompatible with a nasty brand name, "Pulse." omething named "Pulse" could beat the tar out >f anything named "Mac." When I turn on "Pulse," it presents me withn evil, black screen. Then a bunch of indeciherable codes and numbers appear. Then the C:" prompt that gives Mac-owners a facial tic ppears. It certainly doesn't have a cute handle: n the back so I can carrv it arminrt Mnvino if' ikes three trips and an hour of configuration to lake the thing work again, if it works at all. ! Just the way it should be. Nothing is cute, here are no happy faces. It's just a machine. ; John Kennedy made a speech at Rice; Jniversity some 30 years ago. "Why does Rice lay Texas?" he asked. "We do these things not ecause they are easy, but because they are> ard." He wasn't talking about fixing an IBM. He' 'as planning something a little less complicat- J dHe was announcing the nation's mission to; le moon. i ee Clontz's column appears every Wednesday. I.\ y i i J ;islature revenge on The Citadel after his* iport for unpleasant relationship with the i el's sin- school while he served as an! Carolina English professor (Robert Black is J ition for an ex-member of the college's J the citi- faculty) or the American Civil * Liberties Union. (I have a hard! realize time believing Faulkner's tuition e battle, came from the pockets of her par-. rill lose ents.) I walked by her class last; I guess Friday and she looked pretty mis- * poseful erable. And I sat in my English < America class Friday and felt pretty miser- > ction of able. She had stepped on my right pinions, to receive a single-gender educa-1 /ho ere- tion. If she really had courage, I suppose she would stand up to the ; to "see puppeteers and put an end to their ? vballed selfish desires, stop it. * e that I Cadet Miohael Burkett I by the Secondary education junior * vowed The Citadel * x >' , > i ITCno LI UOVi ie relations on this campus are a little bet>n those I've been to before. We have our but it is not as blatant as it has been in Jermaine Smith Pharmacy senior iat the state is not to a point where it : a concern. People want to make it an >n't think there's an issue that exists." Cheryl Jones Mass communications sophomore