OUR VIEWS

A new day in Russia

To some analysts, it was a good sign, to begin with, that the elections happened. There had been a concern, one writer notes, that President Boris Yeltsin might have found an excuse to cancel the elections if he did not like the way they were shaping up. Not only did the elections occur, but Yeltsin will now have a majority in the parliament who see things much the way he does, and who are expected to support the economy's conversion to free enterprise.

The Communist Party will remain the largest one in the parliament's lower house, the Duma, but is outnumbered by the elected members of other parties who are expected to join together to work closely with the executive leadership in the Kremlin. A consequence, observers on the scene and from abroad say, should be an end of stalemate, a stronger government than Russia has lately seen and political stability.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to wage a brutal war in Chechnya, not just against the rebel forces there, but against civilians. The Russian population supports the war, and therefore the man in charge of conducting it, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is now considered the front-runner to succeed Yeltsin as president.

When Yeltsin chose him as prime minister, Putin was not given much of a chance to win the presidency, and if he ultimately does, Yeltsin will have to be seen as something of a political genius, but also, perhaps, as someone who did not shrink from using vile means to achieve his ends.

Court steps over bounds

The court cited a state constitutional provision saying government must be for the "common benefit, protection and security of the people," and not for the "advantage of any single person, family or set of persons."

But it is a well-established principle that equal protection clauses of this sort permit making certain kinds of distinctions among classes of people, such as saying that Social Security benefits are for the disabled and for retired, older workers and their spouses. The U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause does not mean able-bodied, young workers should receive Social Security payments, too.

Governments in all kinds of societies throughout history have concluded it contributes to the common good to afford an array of benefits to heterosexual married couples, who more often than not have had the ability and desire to procreate, and who have then raised their children with both male and female influences.

The Vermont court pointed to exceptions — to the fact that some married couples don't have children, for instance — but surely that does not mean the extension of certain privileges to this particular classification of people and not others was mistaken. Laws are enacted benefiting married heterosexual couples not because all will conform to an expectation, but because the protections make it easier for them to do what the government and society values if they choose.

There is nothing except the will of the societies they serve that prevents governments from concluding all stable domestic relationships between pairs of adults, not just hetrosexual ones, serve the common good and deserve certain legal benefits. Such conclusions have already been reached in various localities around the country, not to mention by private enterprise as companies decide how the allocation of employee benefits will best serve the companies' interests in a stable and productive work force.

The difference with the Vermont case is that those decisions were and are being made through a political process — business-labor relations are political, although not democratic.

The court has left it up to the Vermont Legislature to determine whether it wants to establish gay marriages or something similar that would go under a different heading, such as domestic partnerships. It may turn out, however, that nothing short of the establishment of gay marriages will satisfy the court's requirement of equal benefits.

Because it was based on the state's constitution, this ruling cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It cannot be easily changed by a constitutional amendment because amendments are hard to enact in Vermont. So what you have is a small group of people dictating an outcome that arouses strong feelings in a society ordinarily allowed to resolve such matters through representative government.

If the court's constitutional mandate were clear, it would have been permissible — even required — to skip the legislative process. But it is not clear.

YOUR VIEWS

Name for Hoover's new high school

THE MAIL

Robert O. Finley High School Hoover

They should have a ribbon-cutting ceremony and locate as many former athletics (that were taught by Bob) as possible, to share in a very heart-warming ceremony.

Nancy Inman

2607 Buckboard Road

Need new PSC

All of the poor aren't black. There are some poor whites; however, whenever an article is written about the poor it's usually a black person shown with the article.

Mrs. T. E. Jones

1716 32nd St. North

Revealed bigotry

So, as a gay man, I am "deathworthy" and should be persecuted all of my life because of McShan's narrow religious beliefs? Is this the "love for the sinner" that all Christians spout so loudly?

Or is it merely the cold reality of revealed bigotry against those one does not understand and therefore fears, mixed with the need to enforce by law or violence one's own beliefs on everyone else, whether they believe as you do or not?

Have you so easily and quickly forgotten your own kind, hardworking, quiet and loyal Billy Jack Gaither, murdered in Coosa County, Feb. 19 for being gay? He was beaten by two men he considered friends, put into the trunk of his own car, driven 5-10 miles, dragged out, beaten to death (hopefully he died before the next part), then burned on a pile of old tires doused with kerosene.

If you've seen the national news lately, you can certainly see where McShan's version of religious hate can easily wind up. Two hard-working, middle-aged gay men who ran their own small nursery business, a committed couple of some 20-plus years, well-liked by all in their community — Gary Matson and Winfield Scott Mowder — were murdered July 1, in their bed while they slept, by a pair of heterosexual brothers who claim strong Christian beliefs. The older brother claims it was not murder, in fact, because they were merely ''following God's law."

While McShan may not be on his way to murder, if there are any Christians reading this who might think that your version of God's laws overrules the laws of the United States, do yourself a favor, watch what happens to those two heterosexual Christians.

If you have become convinced that it is OK to murder gay people because somebody told you God hates us, or because you are certain we are ''deathworthy" because you think Leviticus 20:13 of the Bible means that, then get some psychiatric help immediately, or be ready to pray a lot while you are injected with lethal chemicals as you get very closely acquainted with the laws of the U.S. Constitution.

B. Allan Ross

4192 Mississippi St.

San Diego, Calif.

Don't snicker

Armond "Si" Simmons

104 Wadsworth Lane

Pell City

Why isn't there any accountability?

In the final analysis, our children and our teachers are the ones who will have to ''make up" the shortage of cash, not Bruce Wright and not the school board that he reports to. They will make it up by not providing the supplies, the resources, the teachers aides, the librarians and so on, that are essential to creating an atmosphere for learning.

Is there any accountability here? Obviously not. Life goes on, business as usual and no consequences for those we hold accountable for managing our school system funds and programs for learning.

Then there is the case of the U.S. Department of Education and its financial report that was submitted recently to the House Work Force Oversight Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. This is a department that handles (or more likely mishandles) $73 billion of our money every year. Ernst and Young, along with the GAO, report almost a $725 million dollar discrepancy between what the Department of Education says it has in funds and what the GAO says that it should have in funds. Just a 10 percent deficiency, oh well, who cares? It's just about three-quarters of a billion dollars that can not be reconciled.

It is also reported in this same committee hearing that the Department of Education can't determine where $600 million in a Grant and Clearing Account has come from or where it should go. It has just accumulated and no one knows how. Acting Deputy Secretary Marshall Smith says they will come to some understanding of how and where it should go.

Well, whoop-de-do! It's our money that we send Washington to manage and get out to our kids so they can learn. It cannot help school systems and individual students if the DOE doesn't know whose money it is or what the distribution should be. It is also reported in this meeting that the DOE doesn't reconcile payments made or received but every three or four months.

I guess we common citizens are required to live by a different standard when it comes to reconciliation of bank accounts than those who manage our money in Washington, or at the Jefferson County Board of Education.

It is high time that we vote those people out of office that seem to think a $6.8 million shortage means we just pass it onto the ones it is supposed to support. Maybe, heaven forbid, they should be put on probation, or even terminated if irrefutable evidence supports such action. It is your kids who pay the price, and teachers, and aids, and principals who have to figure out how to teach with even less in the way of resources.

As for the Department of Education, it should make every taxpayer realize that our money is so mismanaged. When pummeled by Bob Schaffer, R-Colo., as to any of these funds winding up in someone's personal bank account, DOE Inspector General Lorrain Lewis would not commit to a simple yes or no. They simply and candidly do not know where the discrepancy is.

We as a society had better start holding ourselves accountable for what we know to be right, honest and best for us, and our children, if not our entire nation's best interest. The complacency of the citizenry to not get up in arms over such completely unacceptable job performance is a lack of accountability on our part.

Bernard C. De Vore Jr.

3579 Great Oak Lane

OTHER VIEWS

Dulles not impressed by joint Augsburg declaration

By GEORGE F. WILL
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

"Something of a shock" was, he says, the initial reaction of his father, John Foster Dulles, a flinty Presbyterian, who as a Princeton undergraduate had studied under an especially austere Presbyterian — professor Woodrow Wilson. However, in the 1950s Secretary of State Dulles found that having a Jesuit son gave him special stature with American Catholics, gave him a shared experience with Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, whose son was a priest, and helped him with Catholic politicians in France and Italy.

Avery Dulles, a son of the establishment (his father, the grandson of a secretary of state, was a Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer and a colleague of Bernard Baruch during World War I), was at Choate and Harvard with John F. Kennedy. The great Catholic Medievalist Etienne Gilson had recently been at Harvard and his teachings lingered. And it was from Harvard in autumn 1940 that Dulles wrote home to say he was converting to Catholicism. After one year at Harvard Law School and four years in the Navy he decided on the priesthood.

From the vantage of his ninth decade, Dulles is not greatly impressed by this year's big news in Christianity, the joint declaration of Lutherans and Catholics in Augsburg, Germany, in October. It stated that "a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics."

Some press reports suggested that the purported consensus proves that the Reformation, which made the 16th century the incubator of modernity, was, it turns out, about an arcane misunderstanding. Other reports suggested that the Catholic Church has surrendered on the subject at the heart of Martin Luther's theology — "justification by faith alone."

Salvation, that is, by faith rather than good works. In the 16th and 17th centuries much ink, and not a little blood, was shed over whether faith is the unmerited gift of God's grace, or whether free will, manifested in deeds, participates in earning salvation.

Over a plateful of veal in a restaurant in Little Italy near the campus, Dulles delicately suggests that real differences still divide Lutherans and Catholics concerning the acquisition of faith, the interior renewal wrought by faith, and manifestations of this renewal. The fact that Luther and the Council of Trent are dinnertime topics in the Bronx pleases people who believe that history is dignified by its serious quarrels. And that fact satisfies those Christians who regard the continuing vitality of Christianity's divisions as evidence of spiritual vigor: You cannot split rotten wood.

But there is a common Christian sensibility, elegantly expressed by a priest who lived just slightly more than half as long as Dulles has lived, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89):

"Time has three dimensions and one positive pitch or direction. It is therefore not so much like any river or any sea as like the Sea of Galilee, which has the Jordan running through it and giving a current to the whole."

That may strike the secular-minded as optimistic, but for Dulles, optimism about the long run is not optional. It is a vocational imperative. "The long run," he says dryly, "includes the eschaton."

That is, "the fullness of time," meaning the Second Coming and the Kingdom of God. Meanwhile, Dulles' time is full of writing. The manuscript of his 21st book has just gone to the printer, and the list of his publications during the last 15 months includes two new books, the reissue of a third, and 39 shorter pieces in books and periodicals.

Among sociologists and other advanced thinkers it has long been, so to speak, an article of faith that modernity is inimical to religious faith. Which makes them regard America with scandalized disbelief — America, the most modern of nations, and one planted thick with people who feel, as Hopkins put it in a poem, a religious "ah!" about the presence of the divine:

... the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

That is how the Bronx, and everything contiguous thereto — the world — seems to Dulles, a place constantly burdened by sin but unceasingly solicited by grace. Quite a drama. It keeps him active.
George F. Will can be reached c/o Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20071-9200

'Nutcracker' memories of problems, not perfection

By RACHEL SMOLKIN
BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD

This time of year always recalls my own preteen years in a Houston suburb, when I danced Clara, the little girl whose Nutcracker doll magically transforms into a prince.

But for some reason, it is not the budding of young love or even the romance of dancing that stays with me.

No, my most vivid memory is of my poor mother trying to transform my straight-as-the-Texas-plains hair into luscious ringlets.

The first year was the worst. Mom dabbed goopy blue Dippity-Doo on my hair, then wound it around pink curlers.

By my third year in "The Nutcracker," Mom had gotten ringlet-savvy.

Gone were sleepless nights with hated pink curlers. Mom had discovered some extra-strength hair spray she used to coat my hair before and after the curlers were in place.

Not even a Texas twister could have tossed my plastered curls.

I'm sure they were highly flammable. In one early scene, Clara sneaks downstairs in her nightgown to visit her bandaged and beloved Nutcracker. Either the ballet takes place before the invention of electricity, or Clara's house was not Y2K ready: She darts around her living room gripping a candle, ringlets bouncing behind her.

If my hair had caught fire — and there were some very near misses — the Clear Lake City "Nutcracker" would have ended with an unforgettable explosion.

My other major worry was the ballet slipper Clara rips from her foot and hurls at the evil Rat King.

I rarely actually hit the Rat King. My fondest hope was that I not miss badly enough to smack an audience member with the slipper.

As for the slipper, I wonder now why Clara bothered throwing it at all. Didn't her brother have a more useful toy sword lying around?

Then there was the year one of the rats peed on the stage.

The faux pas presumably occurred during the pitched battle between the rats and the heroic toy soldiers rallying to save Clara.

It is possible the intensity of the fight unnerved the young rat.

News quickly spread backstage: Watch out for that puddle stage right!

The older girls, who danced as graceful snowflakes in the next scene, were not amused.

Onstage, they were forced to pirouette around the puddle. Toe shoes are slippery in the best of times. Potential puddle collisions maximize the peril.

I am sorry to report that that particular performance was taped. The puddle is clearly visible.

Before I danced Clara, I played a party girl in Act I and an "Arabian Nights" apparition in Act II. We tanned our faces, arms and feet with pancake makeup, then pushed the magic sleigh — resembling a big brown pumpkin — across the stage.

There was nothing remotely graceful about that experience. When Clara and her prince seated themselves inside, it was all four dainty dancers could do to heave the heavy sleigh.

Each time we stood waiting in the wings, my fellow sleigh pusher offered me some little-needed advice: To this day her voice remains with us. If ever my family is trying to move a heavy chair or table, Mom and I chorus: "Push HARD!"

Despite the fallout from ringlets and rats and stubborn sleighs, and despite the realization that ballet's effortlessness is a complete illusion, I loved every second.

For years, visions of ballerinas danced in my head, too.
Birmingham Post-Herald Washington correspondent Rachel Smolkin can be reached at Scripps Howard News Service, 1090 Vermont Ave. Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20005, or SmolkinR@shns.com

LOOK BACK

50 years ago, Dec. 23, 1949:

The government's War Assets Administration sells five aluminum plants, built for $130 million during the war, to Reynolds Aluminum Co. for $50 million. The deal allows parti payment in aluminum in lieu of cash.

25 years ago, Dec. 23, 1974:

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