Opinion: In Wednesday’s Letters to the editor
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In Wednesday’s Letters to the editor, readers react to stories about the late Studs Terkel, the city of Los Angeles’ new solar initiative, and a Walter Olson Op-Ed proclaiming the death of slavery reparations.
The director of the California Department of Consumer Affairs writes in to acknowledge a Times report that state nursing boards have been slow to ‘discipline licensees whose personal and professional behavior calls into question their ability to do their job dependably,’ promising to fix the system.
Greg deGiere, of Sacramento, takes issue with our editorial arguing that the brutal murder of John Robert McGraham, a homeless man, was heinous but not a hate crime:
The Times is flatly and shamefully wrong when it says that an attack on a victim with a disability “isn’t rooted in the sort of pervasive discrimination experienced by racial, religious and other minorities.”
In fact, some research shows that people with disabilities — many of them homeless — are victims of much higher levels of violent crime than the general population. Many of these vicious crimes are motivated by biases such as revulsion, fear, resentment or a belief that people with disabilities are inferior and therefore “deserving.”
Under California law, these are hate crimes. But you’d never know it from the official hate-crime statistics or, unfortunately, The Times’ editorials.
Wednesday’s letters page went to press before election results were available. Tune in Thursday for reader response to Barack Obama’s historic win.