Readers Write: Abortion and slavery, the Twins, Soil and Water Conservation District elections

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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John C. “Chuck” Chalberg ponders at length about the commonalities and differences between the abolition decisions of past centuries and the abortion decisions of today (“Slavery then and abortion now,” Strib Voices, Oct. 11). Not once does he acknowledge that abortion bans reduce women to the role of second-class citizens, effectively removing them from the realm of rational beings with sovereignty over their own bodies. In contrast, the abolition of slavery had no moral downside: It prohibited the exploitation of human beings by other human beings, asserting a legal equality between individuals regardless of skin color.

One wonders how he could have missed such a fundamental contrast. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t view women as worthy of personal freedom and sovereignty over their bodies. We are not livestock, and we will not relinquish our humanity. If you feel this is overdramatizing the effect of legal limits on women’s reproductive freedoms, please consider your response to the notion of legally requiring men to produce sperm on demand or the notion of mandatory vasectomy. Sovereignty over one’s body is a fundamental human right.

Eileen McCully, Rochester

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Chalberg brilliantly pointed out in his piece the similarities of the slavery issue then and the abortion issue now. It was a great history lesson as well. There would have been many hypotheticals used to debate slavery then, so here is a hypothetical on the abortion issue now and a multiple-choice question on the hypothetical:

A woman is driving to an abortion clinic to have a late-term abortion. On the way, her car is hit by a drunken driver and she and the unborn baby are killed. The drunken driver is charged with a double homicide. So here is the multiple choice question:

When is the unborn baby a life?

A. The unborn baby is not a life in either case.

B. The unborn baby is a life when killed in the accident but would not have been a life if aborted at the abortion clinic.

C. The unborn baby is a life in both cases.

Byron Lindaman, New Brighton

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John Calhoun had no moral objection to slavery, and Kamala Harris has no moral objection to abortion? That’s the analogy?

Instead, try this: Calhoun had no problem using government to control human bodies, and Harris has no tolerance for government controlling human bodies. That sounds right.

Timothy Hennum, Minneapolis

I was born in 1948. My dad listened to Major League Baseball games on the car radio. I started listening with him when I was still little. Mostly for him it was the St. Louis Cardinals.

I have been listening to baseball on the radio my whole life. The only game I heard in 1969 was the last game of the World Series, which was on Armed Forces Radio. I was a combat Marine in Vietnam that year, and I was in my battalion rear area recovering from having had malaria. The Miracle Mets, oh my.

I live in rural Decorah, Iowa, and can get a quite a few different teams on the two radios in my barn. I listened to the Brewers for a number of years because of the legendary Bob Uecker and his partners. Uecker could call the game, talk about that player, that situation, that team, that team in their division and what was going on in baseball all at the same time; ask Cory Provus.

It was wonderful until the guys from California bought the Brewers. No more two guys in the booth at the same time talking about the game. No more contextual stories. Only one guy in the booth and he hardly had (has) time to call balls and strikes because of all the commercials and gimmicks he had to read.

I started listening around to the other teams’ broadcasts and came upon the Twins with John Gordon and Dan Gladden in the booth. I stayed listening to the Twins. The Twins then, and still today for me, have the best radio announcers in the game. It is like the Uecker broadcasts of old. An amazing journey through the game with the stable of announcers the Twins use today.

I agree there is something wrong with the Twins today and that maybe the Twins should have new ownership (“Pohlads to sell Twins,” Oct. 11). But beware of what you might get with new ownership. Days and nights listening to the Twins’ wonderful announcers on the radio might be a thing of the past. For myself, and all of the Twins radio listeners, I hope not.

Bob Watson, Decorah, Iowa

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The Minnesota Twins have increased in value by 3,763.64% since they were purchased by the Pohlads in 1984.

Here’s the breakdown:

Calculate the total increase in value. Subtract the purchase price from the current value: $1.7 billion - $44 million = $1.656 billion. Divide the increase by the purchase price and multiply by 100 to get the percentage: ($1.656 billion/$44 million) x 100 = 3,763.64%.

Therefore, the Minnesota Twins have increased in value by 3,763.64% since 1984.

Over the last 40 years, the average annual return for the U.S. stock market (represented by the S&P 500) has been around 10%.

Why are taxpayers subsidizing the sports entertainment industry?

Ken Bradley, Red Wing, Minn.

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Joe Pohlad’s news release references his family’s “four decades of commitment, passion, and countless memories.” Is this the same family that issued veiled threats to move the team to a small pocket of cities in North Carolina and not-so-veiled threats offering the franchise up for contraction to Major League Baseball?

Dan Ringstad, Prior Lake

Imagine my surprise when friends called and told me the recent article on local Soil and Water Conservation District elections mentioned my husband, Brian Raney, hadn’t responded to messages from the Star Tribune (“‘Low-key kind of campaign,’” Oct. 10). While this may be typical of him on my queries of taking out the trash or doing laundry, it certainly didn’t seem like he’d ignore the Star Tribune wanting to discuss his work at the Dakota County SWCD. When I asked him about it, I got the same look I saw for 30-plus years of teaching high school sophomores when they had forgotten their homework. To Brian’s credit, he searched his email history and spam, his text messages and his voice messages, to no avail. Heck, he may even have checked the dark web, whatever that is (if it was an actual mailed letter, that might be my bad).

Please vote for Brian Raney, even if he may have misplaced his homework. Anyone who knows Brian has learned he is devoted to the cause of protecting our natural resources, and he’s been able to put this into action in his role as the current Dakota County District 3 SWCD supervisor. He’s a longtime Eagan resident who volunteers for a lot of conservation-minded groups with acronyms that I don’t even try to pronounce, and he will continue to work hard on behalf of not only his constituents, but all Minnesotans.

Lizabeth Erickson, Eagan