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ONLINE POLL Will you go to the spring football game p ^ April 16? Let us know at rage o www.dailygamecock.com. Friday, April 8, 2005 Results posted Friday. AMECOCK EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR ASST. VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Michael LaForgia Patrick Augustine NEWS EDITOR SPORTS EDITOR Jon Turner Jonathan Hillyard VIEWPOINTS EDITOR DESIGN DIRECTOR Wes Wolfe Chas McCarthy THE MIX EDITOR COPY DESK CHIEF Jennifer Freeman Steven Van Haren IN OUR OPINION Late pope put church on progressive path Although he did not expand papal territory or launch crusades like some of his earlier predecessors, the late Pope John Paui II will be remembered by the world as the greatest pontiff to date. Vatican City is the smallest nation in Europe, surrounded by the municipality of Rome, but during the course of his tenure there, the Pope elevated it to prime importance in international affairs. Credited with helping to bring about the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe by supporting the solidarity movement in his native Poland, John Paul also made many other symbolic gestures that restored credibility to a Catholic Church increasingly marginalized by a secular Europe. After participating in the Polish Christian underground P?oPHM10oh?.PtHn!ilr! sheltered Jews dunng WI1’ led the Catholic , D , . , c , Church out of crisis , Lr., , . , , and toward world chu'c s dunn8 d" hor‘ peace and justice. ro”of N“ Gcn’“n>''"'"ml‘ nation of non-Aryans and paid tribute to the victims at Israel’s T T -1_ __ l lutuuiuoi iiiuiiuiuv.m. During his 27 years at its helm, the Catholic Church added nearly 225 million adherents, primarily in areas such as Asia, Africa and South America, thus shaping the direction of the church for years to come. This growth was mirrored in the extensive travels of the pontiff, who was the first non-Italian Pope in nearly 400 years. Indeed, his experience under Soviet control led to his strict interpretations of Catholic dogma and concern for the poor and human dignity that were hallmarks of his tenure. While the Pope held a hard line on matters of morality that were increasingly divergent from those of mainstream Western Catholics, he remained a voice for traditional faith in world affairs in a way that was disquieting for supporters of a divorce between politics and religion. John Paul was picked to lead the church out of a period of crisis and did it deftly, increasing his office’s power and prestige, and hopefully paving the way for a successor who will continue his cru sade for peace and justice worldwide. IT’S YOUR RIGHT Exercise your right to voice your opinion Create message boards at www.dailygamecock.com or send letters to the editor to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. ABOUT THE GAMECOCK FniTnn I ~ I Michael LaForgia DESIGN DIRECTOR Chas McCarthy COPY DESK CHIEF Steven Van Haren NEWS EDITOR Jon Turner ASST. NEWS EDITOR Kelly Cavanaugh VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Wes Wolfe THE MIX EDITOR Jennifer Freeman ASST. THE MIX EDITOR Carrie Givens SPORTS EDITOR Jonathan Hillyard ASST. SPORTS EDITOR Stephen Fastenau SENIOR WRITER Kevin Fellner PHOTO EDITOR Nick Esares SPORTS PHOTO EDITOR Katie Kirkland PAGE DESIGNERS Jillian Garis, Staci Jordan, Jessica Ann Nielsen, Megan Sinclair COPY EDITORS Jessica Foster, Brindy McNair, Daniel Regenscheit, Jason Reynolds, Katie Thompson, Shana Till ONLINE EDITOR Ryan Simmons PUBLIC AFFAIRS Jane Fielden, Katie Mile: CONTACT INFORMATION Offices on third floor of the Russell House. The Editor’s office hours are Monday and Wednesday from 1-3 p.m. Editor: gamecockeditor@gwm.sc.edu News: gamecocknews@gwm.sc.edu Viewpoints: gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu The Mix: gamecockfeatures@gwm.sc.edu Sports: gamecocksports@gwm.sc.edu Public Affairs: gamecockPR@yahoo.com Online: www.dailygamecock.com Newsroom: 777-7726; Sports: 777-7182 Editor’s Office: 777-3914 STUDENT MEDIA DIRECTOR Scott Lindenberg FACULTY ADVISER Erik Collins CREATIVE DIRECTOR Susan King BUSINESS MANAGER Carolyn Griffin ADVERTISING MANAGER Sarah Scarborough CLASSIFIED MANAGER Sherry F. Holmes PRODUCTION MANAGER Garen Cansler CREATIVE SERVICES Burke Lauderdale, Chelsea Felder, Laura Gough, Joseph Dannelly ADVERTISING STAFF Robert Carli, Breanna Evans, Ryan Gorman, Caroline Love, Katie Stephens, McKenzie Welsh I he Gamecock is the editorially independent student newspaper of the University of South Carolina. It is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer, with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of the University of South Carolina. The Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper’s parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student-activity fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $1 each tifom the Department of Student Media. TO PLACE AN AD The Gamecock Advertising: 777-3888 1400 Greene St. Classified: 777-1184 Columbia, S.C. 29208 Fax: 777-6482 A£My g£Cfti/tTEfi5 having TouoH~n/wg goals *4 RKBU™«» 11 =% WT, ; COURTESY OF KRT CAMPUS Letter to my editor: Good frickin ’ job ■ LaForgia’s arrest won’t hurt leadership, but I'm still ticked off It was DEFCON 4 Tuesday night at The Gamecock, and I hated every minute of it. Our editor, Michael LaForgia, had been arrested in the early morning hours for breaking a window with a putty knife. Upon hearing the news, I imagined throttling him with my bare hands. I wanted to kill him. This paper is already seen as a towering bastion of incompetence — completely, utterly, wrongly so. Either way, when your editor gets arrested, you look like utter crap. Jon, the news editor, and I came to one unavoidable conclusion: If the leader of any other student organization had been arrested, we would have the story on the front page — no question. Conversely, we knew i • r r i • 1 • Uldl 11 U11C U1 UIC pitviuus CUUUld had been arrested back in Michael’s news editor days, he would have done the same thing. We didn’t want to do it, but we knew we had to. My blood pressure rose. I hated the position he put us in — as his friends and, on a more important level, as the staff of a paper whose editor spent the night in jail with a crack dealer. I wanted to kick Michael’s ass, but he played football in high school, so one haymaker from him would’ve put me down. The word “bastard” flashed through my head like a cheap neon sign. The editorial board met. We all agreed: It was front-page news. Doomsday scenarios bounced around: The Board of Student Publications y^ would remove ■ ■ > ni-M Michael on HAREN the brink of THIRD-YEAR The MECHANICAL Gamecock ENGINEERING Gamecock STUDENT going print five days a week in the fall. We’d lose a bloodhound journalist for his acting like an idiot. Jon interviewed Michael in his office. Talk about awkward. “Bastard, bastard, bastard” flashed through my mind again. Michael showed up and called an editorial board meeting. He placed his fate in our hands. We would decide if he resigned. There were two extremes in that room: Michael, a great editor, was arrested for the equivalent of a kid accidentally breaking a window with a baseball (he says it was an accident, and I believe him, and I’m not a trusting soul). It could’ve happened to any one of us while goofing off. It didn’t affect his job. Don’t resign. The other extreme was that the accident, even though there was no malicious intent, was irrelevant. The entire campus would immediately lose respect for us. After the hard line we had taken with football players’ criminal activity, we couldn’t just allow him to push aside his arrest. While admittedly a great editor, he had screwed the pooch for the entire organization. Resign. I’ve gone on record to say any football players under the scope of criminal suspicion should be removed from the team. That goes for all organizations, because the greater good and reputation of the team is more important than someone’s desire to be there. The editorial board decided, eventually, not to decide. It was his decision. Michael went to dinner, came back and said he wouldn’t resign. The whole thing makes me sick. I’m pissed at Michael but still value his editorship and friendship as solid gold. I think he acted like an insufferable douche and put this whole paper in jeopardy of losing its journalistic lifeblood: integrity. His stunt might create even more diehard critics whose sole purpose in life is to chase down comma splices and bitch about them. But it is true that the organization’s greater good is most important, and the greater good of The Gamecock is exponentially higher when Michael is around. He broke the law, pure and simple. He’ll get his day in court, just as the ed board said the football players would. Criminal suspects certainly should be booted from their organizations, but because we chose not to choose, I don’t have to make that call. We might be on shaky ground. I don’t know. Michael’s a great editor and great friend. Let’s hope he can steer the ship through this. IN YOUR OPINION Cx&J5 s importance not measured in ads I would like to thank Adam Beam for his editorial opposing a consideration by the Board of Student Publications to eliminate Garnet & Black (“Garnet & Black deserves respect,” Wednesday). As editor in chief of The Gamecock for two semesters, he was the biggest proponent of a daily campus newspaper at USC; however, he realizes that it should not come at the expense of another worthwhile student organization. A few thoughts 1 would add to his argument: Yes, many of G&B’s staff work for both the newspaper and magazine, but many of them don’t. Some overlap only makes sense. Students who are gaining experience in journalism should be encouraged to develop their skills in different formats in order to identify what type of work fits them best. I don’t think students should have to choose to work for either the paper or the magazine, but maybe a better solution would be that they only contribute to one per semester. The Gamecock and Garnet & Black are by no means the same. They are two distinct media with two different purposes. While The Gamecock focuses on day to-day campus events, Garnet & Black covers with more depth broader trends among students. Topics such as the effects of off the-field perks on student athletes, or South Carolina’s first openly gay student-body president, or the growing popularity of stimulant use to aid studying — Garnet & Black explores these in articles that often breach 2,000 words, while a typical story in The Gamecock is about 600. It’s short-sighted to assess an organization’s success by the money it brings in. Comparing The Gamecock’s and Garnet & Black’s advertising revenues on the same playing field isn’t fair. Garnet & Black magazine was founded just 10 years ago; before that, it was USC’s yearbook and --1 I didn t need to sell ads because students paid for it. The Gamecock has multiple ad representatives, while Garnet & Black has only one. Even so, two years ago the magazine brought itself out of debt by selling more than double its advertising quota. If you enjoy Garnet & Black magazine and would like to see it next year, please write to the Board of Student Publications and explain why you think the magazine is important. Letters may be dropped off to Sherry Holmes in Student Media, Russell House 343, by Wednesday. MARY PINCKNEY WATERS Editor in Chief of Garnet & Black Third-year visual communications student Submission Policy Letters to the editor should be less than 300 words and include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. E-mail letters to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. Letters will be edited. Anonymous letters will not be published. Call the newsroom at 777 7726 for more information. Dovouswbc TOKHENOWKflL IF WGKOJBEJSD f ONTWSBOOK.. I SOHDPWGOD? / J ONLINE POLL Do you read the Garnet if Black? Yes 46% No 54% A . tvl 4 Religious marriage restrictions erty ■ Genuine Christians should demonstrate, not legislate, values What really gives a group of human beings the right to tell others how to live? You know, I remember sitting in a Sunday Z^^Z I ‘ school room back at my home church after the Supreme Court struck down the _ sodomy laws awhile back, JOHN and the RABON widespread panic started THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH over gay STUDENT marriages. I was probably the only liberal in the place, and if you ever want to feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle, try to convince a bunch of conservatives that gay marriages aren’t going to bring society crashing down around them. Not too long afterwards, our president was quoted as saying he would seek whatever means possible to create laws banning this kind of union. If you could have watched me read the paper that day, you probably would have seen steam coming out my ears like a Daffy Duck cartoon. i ms came as quite a m&uik. to my system, and it insulted me to no end that our government would try to regulate and control the morality of individuals based on personal beliefs. Isn’t there supposed to be a separation of church and state in this country? Aren’t we supposed to be entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ? I m afraid I don’t see in the fine print where it says “except for those we whose lifestyles or definitions of happiness we don’t agree with. At this point, before we go any further, I wish to point out that I am quite familiar with what the Bible says about homosexuality, and as a Christian I won t disagree with what it says. Of course, I m a little shabby with my Bible verses, so I’m having difficulty finding a passage that allows us to force our morality upon others. Now, I’m not saying that we should allow for stealing, rape, murders, etc. After all, these are crimes in which someone unquestionably injured by the actions of another. These crimes tend to be universal evils, things that any person regardless of religion would say are unquestionably wrong. W lieu two wiioviiwig dUUitS choose to have same-gender companions, where’s the victim? Sure, there might be studies that say it has a damaging effect on society, but who’s taking these studies, and how do we know there aren’t similar studies that say the exact opposite? Certainly if homosexuality is illegal, it fits under the banner of a “victimless crime” and is therefore ludicrous to have secular laws against. My main point here is that we choose the kind of lifestyle we wish to live. Ideally, people who choose to become Christians also choose to accept all God’s laws, and when we do, we choose the lifestyle laid out for us in the Bible. We also believe in the church that God grants us a right to choose whether to follow him and that this is a personal thing between God and an individual (often referred to as our “walk with Christ”). Not in 20 years of going to church have I found any passage making it morally acceptable to force our lifestyle down upon others. I don’t think there is a legal justification to make laws against gay marriage. Laws should be made according to what is truly best for everyone, not according to an individual group’s beliefs. A truly representative society represents the entirety of its people, respects their opinions and never denounces any one person or group just because someone else does.