Couple of Editorials

I wrote this week, on request from the boss for something to fill the page while the regular editorial writer is on vacation. Neither of them has run yet, or seems likely to soon. I think he asks me to write more out of courtesy than anything; he's mainly interested in the fact that I'm the only other person on staff who knows how to do the computer coding to put out an editorial and letters to the editor page.

Amusing to me, too, to see how I've evolved an editorial "voice" over the years that's different from how I write anything else. The severe limitation of space forces you back on rhetoric and away from explanation and fact-cataloguing.

1. Flight 93 Memorial

It's a field of grass in Pennsylvania, a low slope down to a brown line of trees, with a blue ridge in the distance.

And probably no one gave it any thought who lived more than a bike ride away from it until Sept. 11, 2001, when Flight 93, hijacked and barreling toward Washington, D.C., crashed down in this field in Somerset County as passengers stormed the cockpit.

Now controversy simmers around the memorial planned for this field. "Crescent of Embrace," was selected by the Flight 93 National Memorial Federal Advisory Commission from among 1,011 submissions. The jury consists of design professionals, Flight 93 family and community members.

The memorial includes a crescent-shaped cluster of maple trees and a white marble wall inscribed with the victims' names.

It's the crescent that has people riled.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., objects to it "because of the crescent's prominent use as a symbol in Islam —and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists." Many people agree.

The commission defended the design but indicated it is open to alteration before final approval. Paul Murdoch, the architect of the memorial has said he will work to satisfy critics.

This seems unnecessary. The design is not a jarring intrusion; it is fitted to the topography of the area. Our state is laid atop an old, folded, worn-down geology, full of slopes and curves and dells.

Further, it can’t be said often enough that what attacked America on 9/11 was not Islam, but militant Islamism. To quash a design element because it may be seen as Islamic would make an unnecessary negative statement about the religion.

The crescent is not originally an emblem of Islam. It was a badge of the Turkish sultans that only gradually came to be associated with Muslim political power. The Turks probably chose it for its suggestion of “increase;” crescent moons long have been important symbols in pagan practices, and if a crescent truly has a religious association, it's there, not Islam.

Symbols are living things that may be claimed and reclaimed. Symbols don’t have permanent meaning. They are invested with meaning by those who use them and those who receive them. The swastika originally signified good luck. The Democratic Party donkey originally was a rival party's insult. If some Americans feel the crescent is tainted by radical Islamism, why not tug it away from the extremists? Take it back.

This dispute is not like the controversy this summer over plans for an International Freedom Center at Ground Zero. That was a museum that, perhaps, has a place in America, but Ground Zero was not that place.

This is more like Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial design — a black scar on the earth which was reviled by some (including John Kerry) when it was unveiled in 1981. Yet it was built, and with a few alterations it has become a place where veterans and families of the fallen come to share sorrow, celebrate camaraderie and find peace. Once decried as downbeat and defeatist, it's now seen as moving and somber.

Long ago, an American president looked out across a field of grass in Pennsylvania, a low slope down to a brown line of trees, with a blue ridge in the distance. What he said there, then, we can echo now: We can not hallow this ground. The brave dead who struggled and fell from the skies here — and saved the Capitol or the White House by their sacrifice — have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

2. U.N. Population Fund Report

The U.N. Population Fund released its annual report Wednesday. Its central theme was the world's women, and the widespread social and economic discrimination they face.

Statistics on violence against women worldwide are numbing and shocking at the same time. And the report correctly names inequality of women as perhaps the major stumbling block to economic development in the world's poorest nations. In too many places, women are shut out of jobs and enterprise and endure unequal marriage and inheritance laws.

The agency called for an end to discrimination and violence against women. We join that call. And it called for universal "reproductive health."

And here's where it starts to sound like a politicized U.N. bureaucracy. The U.N. has chosen the term "reproductive health" to mask the notion of "contraception and abortion." It holds these ought to be universal human rights. Hence its clash with socially conservative American politicians over the years, and with the Vatican.

Neither side will budge. Very well; the country, and our readers are passionately divided on that issue. But in this new report, the agency clearly writes with one eye on the goal of embarrassing the Americans.

It makes the pitch that the lack of access to contraception and abortion (implicitly because the Americans won't pay for it) is what keeps the world's poor in misery.

To follow the U.N.'s publications, you might think all other religions but evangelicals and Catholics are on board with the abortion and contraception program.

But of course they're not. The nations of the Islamic world are home to some of the most explosive population growth, most galling poverty and worst repression of women on the globe.

This happens for reasons other than religion, but clearly religion and local culture have much to do with it. More than economics, in fact. The fantastically wealthy Middle Eastern states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have birth rates well above the average.

While some liberal Islamic groups, mainly based in the West, allow a family to use contraception to avoid poverty, the bulk of Islam is dominated by older doctrines that permit abortion only to save the mother's life. The economic incentives cited by the U.N. won't fly where the clerics make the rules.

Yet if the U.N. is only capable of scolding the Americans and the Pope, and lacks the heart to work for change in the rest of the world, it is failing the very women it professes to help.

Furthermore, it's not clear whether the U.N.'s typical suggested solution to these problems -- shoveling billions of dollars into the U.N. -- will help them either.

In the United States in 1800, the average woman had 8 children -- more than women do in Yemen or Ethiopia today. As the country grew rich (in part because of its growing population), the birth rate fell. By 1900, the typical American woman bore only three or four children.

Historians still debate why, and how, this happened. It's safe to say, though, that it didn't come about because of large-scale intervention of a world bureaucracy.