There’s no need for artificial turf in city
Regarding “Artificial turf grows support,” Thursday:
Instead of pushing for artificial turf, a better idea is to plant native Southern California plants in front gardens. And during the summer months, when everything is supposed to be brown, let the yard cops go after who has their sprinklers on.
DVOSHE WALKOWIAK
Glendale
Dais needs a woman’s touch
The present Glendale City Council needs renovation. None of the present candidates should be retained. It’s time for a member with a female point of view on the council.
I support Laura Friedman and I hope many others will feel the need of someone of the feminine persuasion to be heard. She is a small business owner and has the credentials to serve our city.
FRANCIS ADAMS
Glendale
Darwin a fascist? Think again
As a regular contributor to this newspaper, the Rev. Bryan Griem delights in attacking any view that is not precisely in accord with his own, while demeaning anyone who holds such a view. In discussing Darwin in the In Theory column Saturday (“Darwin’s place in the world”), Griem managed to dismiss the view of the largest Christian church in the world by stating that “we’re either evolutionists or Christians, not both,” thereby contradicting the official Catholic position.
Griem also contributed an impressively long but hideously inaccurate sentence that blamed Darwin for some of the major crimes of the 20th century. According to Griem, “It was Darwin’s atheism that fueled the murderous, Communist regimes of the past century, as well as Hitler’s quest to ‘exterminate, and replace the savage races’ as Darwin proposed in ‘The Descent of Man.’” Let us address the four problems with that sentence.
1. As Pastor Jon Barta observed in the same column, Darwin “was a self-professed agnostic, but never an atheist.”
2. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is inextricably intertwined with the science of genetics. In Stalin’s USSR, Trofim Lysenko had so much influence that genetics was banned in 1948 as a bourgeois pseudoscience. The ban persisted until well into the 1960s. Lysenkoism was also accepted in Maoist China. If Griem desires to associate Darwin with a prominent economic system, he should not pick communism. Rather, he should concentrate on the many volumes written on the Darwinian nature of laissez-faire capitalism.
