Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:
At the time critics called the president’s executive order “revolutionary and politically reckless.” National polls showed his civil rights program was wildly unpopular. Leaders in Southern states railed against his executive overreach. They insisted that following the executive order would make Americans fundamentally unsafe.
The year was 1948. The president was Harry S. Truman. His order began the slow and painful process of systematically desegregating the nation’s military and is credited with helping to break down racial segregation in all facets of American life.
The recent temper tantrum by Texas state leaders over President Obama’s instructions to schools about accommodating transgender students is strikingly reminiscent to the outcry generated in response to the federal government’s march to equality during the Civil Rights era.
The federal directive specified that under the Title IX federal civil rights law, schools must treat a student in a way that is consistent with the student’s gender identity. Schools cannot require transgender students to produce a medical diagnosis or a birth certificate or other identification document, nor force them to use bathrooms inconsistent with that identity.
Conservatives would like to draw an imaginary line between the guiding principles of the Civil Rights era and the extension of rights to the LBGT community. It cannot be done. This country does not discriminate based on inherent traits. This is about political gamesmanship, not protecting or educating our children.
While the nation’s attention vacillates between Donald Trump and bathroom stalls, thousands of people are overdosing on drugs prescribed to them by their doctors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that nearly 29,000 Americans died from abusing opioids, which include prescription painkillers and heroin, in 2014. The death rate from opioid abuse tripled from 2000 to 2014. Drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States.
In North Carolina, the Senate is expected to consider a bill to make overdose reversal drugs more easily available to the public. More naloxone hydrochloride could cut fatal overdoses in half, state health director Randall Williams said.
That’s a fine move but, as Williams said, it merely treats the symptoms. In North Carolina and nationally, public campaigns need to make doctors and patients alike more aware of opioid painkillers’ danger so they are not overprescribed. Doctors also must better use technology to ensure patients are not shopping around to stockpile painkillers.
More people die of drug overdose than in car accidents. It’s past time we lent the problem similar attention.
Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is unlike every major party nominee for more than 30 years in this respect (among others): He hasn’t made his tax returns public.
Will he? Trump keeps us guessing. He wants to, he has said, but only after a “routine” audit is complete. (Note: Richard Nixon released his returns during an audit.)
You don’t learn anything from a tax return, Trump averred to reporters.
This is not at all true, as anybody who has completed a complicated tax return knows.
A tax return shows your income, for one thing. It shows your exemptions. It shows your charitable donations. It provides information about your business activities. It provides information about whether and how you’ve sheltered your income offshore.
It provides clues about your wealth, a subject about which Trump is remarkably touchy, claiming to be worth more than $10 billion, while Forbes and Fortune magazines have estimated his worth at less than half that amount.
Stop the silly pronouncements. Trump needs to release his tax returns.