The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 10

A-10 Comment the Cincinnati enquirer Saturday, May 27, 198s) THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER WILLIAM J. KEATING Chairman JOHN P. ZANOTTI President and Publisher EORGE R. BLAKE ftor, Preside DARRVL W. EVERETT Vice Preside.

Advertising THOMAS S. GEPHARDT Associate Editor WILLIAM R. JOHNSTON Vice Presiae. Circulation MARK S. MIKOLAJCZYK Vice Preside, Production AMES A.

SCHWARTZ Vice Preside, Finance A Gannett Newspaper The Middle East Baker has laid the groundwork for a renewed search for peace JimWrit at the Alamo. anti-abortion policy Secretary Baker said, it's time for Israel to "lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel" and "reach out to Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights." He emphasized U.S. support for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's plan for elections in the occupied territories. He also admonished Palestinians that this was an opportunity they should accept, rather than reject, as they've done so many previous opportunities. "Once again you have been presented with a possibility now engage it," he said.

Secretary Baker also made clear that the United States does not support the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) goal of an independent Palestinian state. U.S. policy envisions, instead, "self-government for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in a manner acceptable to Palestinians, Israel and Jordan. Such a formula provides ample scope for Palestinians to achieve their full political rights. It also provides ample protection for Israel's security as well." He pointed the way to a rejuvenated peace process with some promise of success.

The question is whether the parties most concerned will seize the moment and accept it. Secretary of State Baker's summons to Israel to abandon its dream of a "Greater Israel" and to reach out to the Palestinians was blunt, but essential. So was his summons to the Palestinians to stop their violence "and reach out to Israelis and convince them of your peaceful intentions." His appeals were all the more significant in that they were in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a top Washington lobby for Israel. Many in the audience were critical, but Thomas A. Dine, executive director of the committee, branded it "a fair speech." Secretary Baker outlined no new U.S.

policy directions, but was far more straightforward than most American officials have been in the past. Such candor and directness by the United States, with its key role in Mideast diplomacy, have long been needed. The Israeli-Palestinian dilemma will never be settled otherwise. Israeli leaders should recognize as many Israelis already do that Israel must negotiate with the Palestinians in a way that almost certainly means Israel's abandonment of most, if not all, of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some territorial adjustments for security may be necessary, but as 'Buz Lukens The 8th District congressman ought to step down now a national policy of universal freedom for wrongdoing, sad circumstances or no.

The professor's contention that the safety and survival of the human race require off-on fertility devices for both men and women implies a total surrender of mankind to undisciplined sex. This position overlooks that survival of the race and abortion on demand are inconsistent. It also denies that chastity, celibacy and disciplined marriage are practical or possible. While it is true that divorces, infidelity, single-woman pregnancies, AIDS, various unorthodox "relations," high school sex, pornography, amorality and immorality are increasing, we should never surrender to wrongdoing. It is time to reverse this trend.

Discipline, self-denial and recognition that each person is a child of God are essential to the safety and survival of the human race. Following the evil Dred Scott decision, violence was met with violence, at Fort Sumter and afterward. The evil decision put a stamp of approval on immorality, just as the evil Roe vs. Wade decision turned loose the abortion mills. The violence is initiated at the mills, by the mills.

Let it be overcome by reasoned persuasion, education, peaceful protest and demonstrations at least as lawful as Lend-Lease and Sanctuary. The Civil War could have been prevented by the kind of decent conscience on civil rights that has made possible much liberation of blacks in the last 40 years. The strife that the professor fears can be prevented by the cultivation and achievement of a decent national conscience on life, not by cynicism, surrender or name-calling associations, surely not by unfounded confidence in questionable technology or by misusing the courts to seek what the people and the legislatures reject. National policy needed The United States was founded on ideals. Education on this issue should be directed to the establishment of a national policy in opposition to abortion, not the current court-imposed policy that renders the states helpless to discourage it.

A consensus can be rallied around pro-life and anti-abortion. There may be, it is true, serious differences with respect to exceptions. But no consensus can ever be rallied about the current court-imposed policy. Even its supporters realize that the alleged constitutional basis for Roe vs. Wade is without reason or foundation, and they have conjured up new transparent rationales, most false, some inconsistent.

The truth is that the majority of American people hold that abortion is wrong. Any sound national policy must recognize and build on this fact. Attempts to impose a contrary policy on this nation generate violence. A national BY CHARLES M. HOGAN Guest Columnist The identification of Professor Richard D.

Erlich with Miami University and as guest columnist for The Enquirer may cause some readers to assign to "Abortion's Technical Fix" (May 13) more weight than it deserves. Neither institution endorses his column. Absent the connections, the column would be taken as facetious. Professor Erlich is predicting that "the conflict over abortion is not going to go sic away." His prediction that "it will undoubtedly get worse" is probably accurate. He is on sound ground in recommending that "we should carefully consider alternatives." But we should not consider the cynical measures that he offers.

The professor fears internal war and strife because "there can be no compromise on the abortion issue as it is currently formulated." The pro-choice stance, as currently formulated, seems to be that a baby can be killed at any time before the 24-week stage and in fact up until the cord is cut. This because the shrinking Blackmun et element on the Supreme Court has given top priority to so-called abortion rights. There can be no compromise with this stance, as far as pro-life people are concerned. Nor can there be any compromise with any formulation which fails to extend, or endeavor to extend, Fifth and 14th amendment protections to all persons from conception to death. Protecting the unborn Among alternatives which should be considered singly and collectively are: a constitutional amendment to protect the unborn, overruling the pernicious Roe vs.

Wade decision, statements of anti-abortion policy in national and state legislatures, prayer, discipline, morality, teaching of chastity and self-restraint, and whatever else may be conducive to universal control of mankind over sex (as distinguished from the present growing control of sex over mankind). Always by implication blaming the pro-life people for violence, the professor would offer them a constitutional sop: a declaration of personship from the moment of conception with full legal protection. But the sop would not be effective until A.D. 2025 or so, allowing time, according to him, for Pill II (abortion pill) to let all abortions go private, all abortion mills to close, leaving no evidence of abortions for the pro-life people to protest. This sop is full of fallacies.

First, pro-lifers would view it as so compromising on its face and analogous to the original postponement of the prohibition of slave trading as to be utterly unacceptable. That is, any postponement of an anti-kill amendment is unacceptable. That is logic. Second, in this day of fetus tissue sales, abortion of fetuses of undesired sex or "defective" fetuses, let alone abortion profiteers, an assertion that the abortion All that the pro-life people ask is protection for the unborn. industry as now established will entirely be replaced by the abortion pill displays a gross overconfidence in "technology." Third, public immorality does not become justified by going secret.

Getting away with wrong does not make it right. Abortion multiplied is race killing. The abortion pill makes it all the more evident that the national need is for a healthy conscience on the life issue. The professor suggests that there may be no need to kill the fetus. It, like sperm, can be put in cold storage.

No need to bother with adoption. Then after A.D. 2026 or so anyone wanting a new person on demand could simply insert the fetus into self or a willing female. This fetus-storage proposal is at a level below horse-breeding. If men be animals, they are not brutes but rational animals.

Note that the various proposals of pseudo-science go all the way from unbridled condom sex to no sex at all. True and responsible marital love is not to be replaced by fetus insertion in the strange womb. Suffice it to say that, while sympathetic to childless couples who want children, we right-to-life people will not be distracted by wild speculations. The present evil is 1.5 million abortions a year. Does the professor seriously propose storing 1.5 million fetuses a year in expensive cyrogenic facilities, by those who now throw them in garbage cans or plead poverty to get sympathy? By proposing a sop to the pro-life people, the professor attributes the generation of violence to them.

They are by him tied up in one potentially dangerous bundle with racists, terrorists, Weathermen rioters, bombers, nationalists of violent kind, fanatics and whackos. The pro-choice people he treats by implication as pacifist lambs (in spite of the butchery of 1.5 million babies a year). Blind faith in technology will not bring peace on this" issue. Nor will synthetic fears. All that the pro-life people ask is protection for the unborn.

To ask this is not to lynch surgeons at abortion sites. Pro-life people want the United States to declare a policy of protection for the unborn, as distinguished from the present erroneously declared policy of no protection imposed on us by the Supreme Court. What is required further is a continuous and vigorous program of education, teaching sex as the servant of man, not the master, teaching respect for life from the moment of conception. Will there always be some abortions? Probably, as long as money is in it. The existence of wrongdoing, even that arising out of sad circumstances, does not in any way justify quirements for children and caregivers." Great quantities of data would be gathered on "race, sex, ethnic origin, handicapping condition and family income." Every state would be required to create its own advisory commission.

You might suppose that the states could be trusted to set up appropriate bodies, but no. The ABC bill spells out exactly how the state commissions must be constituted not fewer than 21 members nor more than 30, including one pediatrician, one person in business, one person in organized labor, one representative of fire marshals, and "at least one early childhood development expert." The general idea is that each state would be allotted an appropriate share of the federal appropriation. Persons wishing to receive child-care assistance would apply for a certificate to be used at an eligible day-care facility. The operator of the facility then would turn in the certificate for reimbursement by the state. Two-parent families could not qualify un Friday's conviction of U.S.

Rep. Donald E. "Buz" Lukens marks the end of a sensational chain of events that began when allegations of his sexual misconduct came to light in February. It should also mark the end of his congressional service. Had the jury in the Franklin County Domestic Relations Court acquitted him, he still would have made enough damaging admissions to disqualify him from seeking re-election in the fall of 1990.

Now that he has been found guilty, declining to seek another congressional term isn't enough. He should quit now and allow a special election to determine who serves the 8th Congressional District through January, 1991. The sexual infractions of public figures sometimes are titillating, and voters are frequently inclined to forgive and forget. The rationalization seems to be that men will be men in or out of public office. One consequence is that public figures begin to imagine that they enjoy some sort of immunity a license to use the power and influence of their positions to multiply their sexual conquests.

The charges on which Representative Lukens was convicted, however, go far beyond titration: they border on the disgusting. They make it all the more important that he give his constituents an opportunity to choose a congressman more deserving of their trust. "Buz" Lukens' rise to political prominence was extraordinary. As an activist in conservative and young Republican circles, he was a national figure even before he won his first term in Congress. Other young conservatives from coast to coast admired his easy affability, his energy, his seeming devotion to long-established conservative values.

They rejoiced when he entered Congress because they imagined that his voice would be theirs as well. They are among those who have reason to feel betrayed by the record this week's trial laid out. But every instance of misconduct by a public official is a betrayal of trust whose consequences go far beyond the specifics of the case. It sends a message to the public that standards with which everyone else must live don't apply to officeholders, that the privileges of high office include being excused for any infraction of common decency. That is the legacy of the Lukens case a legacy that not even the most zealous of Representative Lukens' onetime supporters can forgive.

James J. Kilpatrick children were to receive subsidized aid, eventually the annual outlay would come to more than $50 billion. For starters, this bill would authorize a mere $2.5 billion, plus another $100 million toward subsidizing liability insurance. The federal budget for 1990 now projects a deficit of $100 billion. Where is the money coming from to finance this grandiose plan? If cost were the only objection, some budgetary trickery probably could be devised to make the thing look plausible.

Cost is the least of the objections. This act would thrust the heavy hand of "minimum federal standards" into an area that 31 The ABC's of child care bill spell a major mistake Charles M. Hogan, J.D., Ph.D., is a retired corporate executive and patent counsel. less both parents were working. Roughly one-third of all day care now is provided through churches.

These church facilities would be eligible for certification, but only if every trace of sectarianism were obliterated. Said the Senate committee: "Section 19(a) embodies the committee's intent that all aspects of child care services be completely non-sectarian in nature and content." So much for grace at meals. Given the something-for-nothing mentality that pervades so much of the nation, the sad prospect is that ABC will pass. A few conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch of Utah, reluctantly support the measure. Such moderate Republicans as Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas oppose it.

It will be up to them to sustain a presidential veto when the time comes. James J. Kilpatrick is a Washington-based, nationally syndicated columnist. WASHINGTON: It used to be said of something simple that it was "just as easy as ABC," but the ABC bill now being pushed to a vote in the Senate is anything but simple. This is the Kennedy-Dodd "Act for Better Child Care Services." It is a monstrosity.

The only thing good about this bill is the intention of its sponsors. They want to help millions of low-income and middle-income families who need day care for their children. The need for such services is clear, and the need is growing as more women enter the work force. When that has been said, the best has been said. The bill would create a new entitlement program of gargantuan proportions.

In Senate hearings it was estimated that 18 million children (defined as those under 18 years of age) would be eligible for the vouchers. Only 6 of them might be aided under this bill. The average cost for the kind of day care envisioned under this program is $3,000 per child per year. If all the eligible ought to be entrusted to the states. The old rock-solid principle of federalism would be further eroded.

At present some encouraging trends are developing in the private sector, as large employers provide their own day-care facilities for the children of employees. A massive program of federal aid would deter these efforts just as they are getting under way. The ABC bill holds the prospect of an administrative nightmare. Vapors of bureaucracy seep from every page. Within the Department of Health and Human Services a whole new division would be created, to be headed by an administrator of child care.

An unwieldy National Advisory Committee on Minimum Child Care Standards would set to work at once in fixing "group size limits" and "maximum appropriate child-staff ratios." A national standard would be fixed for "qualifications and background of child-care personnel." There would be "health and safety re.