Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:
U.S. Steel recently announced 770 layoffs within its company, and there may have been a collective local sigh of relief that the region’s workers weren’t among the trimmed workforce.
That would be the wrong response.
The recently announced U.S. Steel layoffs are warning signs we need far more than steel in our economic backbone. We need a full skeleton of diverse fields – something that provides structure when individual pieces of the local economy falter.
We’ve seen far too many examples of what happens to communities that put all of their eggs in one industrial basket. Look no further than the desperate blight of Gary, Ind., or other parts of the region’s urban core, where an economic storm has left abandoned buildings, crime and poverty in its wake.
Steel is just a commodity. Factories that make use of steel to produce goods and services also would enhance our region’s economic strength in meaningful ways.
Northwest Indiana can’t afford to relax. The layoffs elsewhere are a blaring siren, warning us of potential disaster in our own future.
Too many people have a backward understanding of what religious freedom means. They go looking for violations of religious freedom and, not finding them, make up scary scenarios imagining a way Americans will be prohibited from practicing their religion.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, for example, recently signed a bill in the name of religious freedom. It’s completely unnecessary.
The “religious freedom” bill, now law, forbids public colleges and universities from requiring student religious organizations to accept members who don’t adhere to the group’s core beliefs.
The bill “preserves intellectual diversity and religious liberty by allowing student clubs and organizations to determine the membership of their own groups,” Brownback said.
In actuality, the law does the opposite. Religious liberty means an environment where people have the freedom to practice their faith, but rather than remove discrimination this law allows it. And it narrows intellectual diversity – in the very places where we should be encouraging diversity of thought and expression.
Laws such as this take away liberty by actually sanctioning religious discrimination. And, again, student religious groups independent of a public institution already have had the freedom to do what they want, just as every church on every street corner does.
The most consistent and profound message emerging from the drug summit this week in Atlanta is that drug addiction is a disease.
And we’re failing at treating that disease. The Centers for Disease Control, in a recent statement, noted, “in the past decade, while the death rates for the top leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer have decreased substantially, the death rate associated with opioid pain medication has increased markedly.”
Despite that, the resources for treating this disease fall woefully short of the need. Worse, the medical system too often enables addiction through over-prescribing powerful painkillers.
Kentucky has one of the highest rates of overdose deaths in the nation, and there is all too much evidence of the devastation drug abuse has wrought in Kentucky. It has destroyed lives, diminished the workforce, filled up courts and prisons and caused no end of pain to families.
While it’s essential to shift from a punishment to a treatment mode on drug addiction, the most efficient approach to address it is prevention, as with other diseases.