The Facts from Clute, Texas • Page 4

BIN Cornwall Editor and Publisher Wanda Gamer Cash Managing Editor Greg Ban Assistant Managing Editor C. AlHn Meant Associate Editor (Opinion) Opinion The Brazosport Facts Tuesday, August 22, 1995 Page 4A EDITORIAL Our authority As customers we have a responsibility to attend BWA meeting, eye increase razosport Water Authority board members may decide part of our financial future tonight. On their meeting agenda is a proposed increase in the wholesale rates cities pay for water, an increase that will trickle down to homeowners since most cities logically pass through that cost in residential water rates. The original request for a 10- cent increase was reduced last week to 6.5 cents after a couple of board members said they would not support the higher amount. Those board members are appointed by the cities which buy water from the BWA.

Based on wholesale water rates, the 10-cent increase could raise the annual cost for an BWA MEETING 8WA budget Is set for 6 bday the BWA located at 1251 distance charges for our car phones. There is no negotiating necessity, nor should there be any game playing to arrive at fair funding for the water authority. If, indeed, the water operations have been inadequately funded since the plant went on line in 1989, the directors are obligated to figure out a solution. Maintenance must be performed, environmental regulations and permit requirements must be met, debts paid. Member cities must be part of the funding debate, regardless of the unreasonable water supply contract which requires the customer cities to pay whatever rate the authority sets "without objection, dispute or contest." average family by the lower increase would up the bill by about $4.

It doesn't seem like much on paper, but it starts to add up when you figure that cities usually add other charges to the water bill. Furthermore, a review of the water authority's four rate increases in four years makes it likely that the requests for more money will continue. Especially if the board adopts a cost study's recommendation to raise rates by 2 to 3 cents annually over the next five years. What the board members and the customers we, cities and individuals who ultimately pay for that water must realize is that this is not a luxury item at stake. We're not talking cable TV rates or long And residents who pay the pass- through rates also must be part of the process, through town meetings, budget hearings and information campaigns.

Customers must have quality water at an affordable rate. Bringing the plant up to standards probably will mean higher rates, but it also could mean the customer cities will have to subsidize some of the expense. It is not true that member cities do not have a say in the water authority's business. Cities and their residents are the water authority. Today's editorial is by Wanda Garner Cash, managing editor of The Brazosport Facts, on behalf of The Facts editorial board.

YEAH.BIG PUT NY SEV.V-ESIEEM UP AGMNST THtlRS) AttY fAY. Sadly for heryjane Roe will never be 'regular' WRIT! US Letters to the editor are well read and extremely important to The There are a few guidelines. We don't use enormous or unsigned fetters, and print form Wttere; the writer must Include an address and daytime number, in case.we need to contact you. We wW not publish addresses and numbers. We aometimes adit Icing letters, and we that letters be to less than 25d welcome all letters, responding Issues; We don't print letters Wdet'ermine to be defamatory or in vio- THANK YOU LETTERS Acclaim is open to all who wish to express thanks to a group or individual.

Some guidelines must be observed. Include your name, address and a daytime telephone number. Be specific and brief. Acclaim is not a political or business column. It shouldn't be used as a campaign tool or business promotion.

Send letters to: The Brazosport Facts, Acclaim, P.O. Box 549, Clute, Texas 77531. Acclaim runs on Mondays. Our FAX number is 265-9052. OSTON The answering machine in her Dallas home now offers the world only the plainest of telephone messages.

"There will be no press statement," it says, "there will be no more public appearances from me. I am going to be regular person Norma McCorvey." Two weeks ago, the 47-year-old, who once described herself as "a poor, half- crazy, half-ordinary woman who'd been picked by fate to become a symbol of something much bigger and finer than herself," went through one of the most public of conversions. Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, the real person behind the class action suit, the woman behind the woman's right to choose, defected to the other side. She quit her job at an abortion clinic and moved literally next door to Operation Rescue.

On network television she dropped the label pro-choice and picked up the label pro-life. Now she wants to be "regular person Norma McCorvey." But both sides of this stalemated war have acted as if Norma were a flag to be captured and lost. The head of Texans United for Life said succinctly and gleefully, "The poster child has jumped off the poster." The pro-choice groups offered careful press releases supporting her and every other woman's right to decide, while privately they groaned, "We don't need this." In real-life terms, McCorvey has become a poster child of only one thing: ambivalence. After declaring that "abortion is wrong," she said, "I still believe in a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion" in the first trimester or if the baby is deformed. By any pollster's measure, she is staking out the middle ground full of Americans.

Still, her drama seems less political than personal. What happened to this woman seems to be less a change of mind ELLEN GOODMAN than a change of heart. "I am a rough woman," she once wrote, "born into pain and anger and raised mostly by myself." The daughter of an alcoholic, she was sexually assaulted as a teen-ager, briefly married at 16 and deserted shortly thereafter. Norma was a 21- year-old carnival worker pregnant for a third time when she came in contact with Sarah Weddington, the young Texas lawyer who argued the case all the way to the Supreme Court. McCorvey told Weddington that her pregnancy was the result of rape, though it wasn't.

Weddington never told McCorvey how to get an illegal abortion, though she knew. By the time the Roe case was decided, Norma's baby had been born and like her others, given up for adoption. There was little affection between client and lawyer, whose lives were both shaped by this case. When the "conversion" was announced, Weddington said honestly and coolly, "All Jane Roe ever did was sign a one-page legal affidavit." McCorvey complained bitterly and hotly that pro-choice folks "just never gave me the respect that I thought I deserved." The truth is that after revealing herself as Jane Roe, after the Holly Hunter movie, after the minutes and sound bites of fame, Norma needed more. "I can't really remember a pro-choice person here in Texas ever calling me and saying, 'Good morning, Norma, are you having any trouble in your life? 1 In March, when Operation Rescue moved in next door to the clinic, she angrily called them "a pack of vultures." But slowly a relationship grew between the charismatic Flip Benham, the preacher head of Operation Rescue, and McCorvey.

Over time, he called her Miss Norma and she called him Flipper. They had both traveled down a stretch of rough road. Most importantly, she said, "He doesn't make me feel bad about myself." Connie Gonzales, the woman who has been Norma's partner for over 20 years, believes that "she's gullible and those people stuck things in her head." Maybe the thing they stuck in her head was "love." On Nightline, Benham said, "I love Norma McCorvey." McCorvey echoed, "They are my friends. They genuinely love me." In the end, this was not the conversion of Jane Roe. It was the seduction of Norma McCorvey.

The vulnerable, sometimes angry, often-times needy woman was wooed by the promise of "rescue," of being taken in, cared for, and loved for herself, "not what I could do for them." But we are not witnessing the happy ending to this love story. Sooner or later the poster child of ambivalence will be forced to choose again by new, absolutist "friends." Already these "friends" are hinting, as one spokeswoman said, that "her theology isn't straight yet. She's like a new Sooner or later this troubled woman, eager for attention and eager to escape it, struggling with her own demons, will discover that her "rescuers" too have a price tag a child for their poster. And sooner or later she will discover again that for Jane Roe, there is no possibility of being "regular person Norma McCorvey." Ellen Goodman's column is syndicated by The Boston Globe Newspaper Company. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR We, the people, are government To EDITOR; The daily stories which we read, hear and see from all the fine sources of news available now concerning every level of government and the countless dollars being spent on all sorts of grants, projects, programs, have common basic facts which I feel should be emphasized along with any money-spending subjects.

First, we, the taxpayers and voters, are the government and the dollars being spent or shifted from one pocket to the other is, or was, our money. By using basic addition and subtraction to check out the stories dealing with base closings, redeployments, etc. in the daily news, seems to add up to little, if any, benefit to our pocketbook and or purse. Throw in a goodly portion of all the "no cost to us" grants and gifts and stuff, then the concoction that results most times doesn't smell exactly fit to eat. If we threw the whole mess out where it belongs we then succeed' in changing what was once long ago regarded as gospel truth.

The former factual phrase, "money doesn't grow on trees" becomes just one more myth to join all those from the past downed by "friendly fire." The points that I am attempting to make are these: We are the government. We provide the money. We authorize our employees to spend our money when the majority (in most cases) of we citizens elected them. We are the "infrastructure" (to use a now-popular and overused word) of this great country from the local bottom to the federal top. I think the comic strip character Pogo said it quite well.

"We have met the enemy and they are us." I would just like to add a phrase often used by us old oil patch roughnecks when describing our work. "It's just like wiping your rear end on a wagon wheel. There ain't no end to it." In the unlikely event that this letter ever finds print, let me tie this crude phrase in to my theme. Most of the responsibility (if not all) sits exactly where it belongs, on our shoulders. As I said previously, we are the government, and if that is still a fact, then we can't dodge another fact.

When we are asked to pay for and receive public money for grants, programs, projects or whatever, we justify it by telling ourselves, "Some of those bucks we paid in so why not get it back along with more?" Hey, that's a very commendable attitude to have from my point of view. I'll close this boring and repetitious letter with some old cliches, phrases, sayings, that in my opinion, will eventually prove to be all too true. Those would be such as, "What goes up must come down," "Rob from Peter to pay Paul," "The straw that broke the camel's back," "When chickens come home to roost," "The fall don't hurt you, it's the sudden stop." I am sure there are many more that would fit in very well with the message I am attempting to deliver, I've promised to end this probably too long-winded dialogue. Don Mathews Lake Jackson Feature story offends reader To EDITOR: I am very appalled at this story or whatever you call it that was printed in our local paper. I know y'all did not write it, but you made the decision to print it.

During the last year and a half, I have watched this paper go slowly downhill. If you needed to fill a space, you could have used something different. Who in their right mind would even dream of your mother getting it on with the lady next door? We are living in a sad society and it seems our local paper is helping people like Jill Sobule become a success. How sad. Diane Lowery Lake Jackson Editor's note: The story, which ran on Page 7A in the Tuesday, Aug.

8, edition of The Facts, was a feature on a hit song by pop singer Jill Sobule. The headline said, "Jill Sobule finds success through kissing," and the hit song is titled, "I Kissed A Girl." Croatia conflict often confusing To EDITOR: I have been trying to follow in newspaper and TV what is going on over in Bosnia, or is it Yugoslavia? Today's paper (The Facts, Aug. 8) refers to Serb-led Yugoslavia. Charley Reese (Aug. 5) writes of Croatia as a country and Bosnia-Herzegovina as a country.

Then he writes of 600,000 Serbs living in Croatia and of Serbs owning 70 percent of Bosnia, a country ruled by Muslims. Somewhere I saw a mention of Serbia. Is Serbia a country? Where is Serbia? It seems to me that Croat refers to an ethnic group. Is Serb another group? Is Muslim another ethnic group and also a religious group? Does Croat refer also to a religious group? What is the religion of the Croats? What about the Serbs? And are they another ethnic group? If so, what? And what is their religion? But I still have more questions, perhaps more important than those above. Are any of the groups willing to live and let live? Are they willing to establish a government with fairness and liberty of conscience? I know that has been one of the problems in the world.

Even now, there are several countries where it is difficult to be anything other than a Muslim. I am aware that there have HUNGARY wBihac UdbinaY BOSNIA- HERZEGOVINA Sarajevo Zapa The Croatian army's swift retaking of the KraJIna region leaves only the eastern Slavonla enclave under the control of rebel Serbs. The two regions as well as the western Slavonla enclave, which was retaken by the Croats In May, came under Serb control during the fighting that accompanied the breakup of the old Yugoslavia. been, and still may be, some governments dominated by some so- called Christian sects. Is Croatia or Serbia (or both) one of these? Before I can know what to tell Congress or President Clinton what I think they ought to do, I need answers to some or all of my questions.

Reese says the Croats and the Muslims in World War II were on the side of Nazi Germany, while the Serbs were on our side. One last question: Are the Serbs caught in an ethnic (or religious) struggle between Croats (Croatia) and Bosnia (Muslims)? Roger Byler Sweeny.