DCPS is getting rid of experienced educators

At a citywide meeting on May 3, Mr. Jesus Aguirre from the D.C. chancellor’s office told some local public schools that DCPS counselor positions will not be funded in elementary schools that do not have 600 students.

It appears that Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michelle Rhee believe that the way to reform public education is by firing the bottom half of public school employees. As Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, reported about New York Chancellor Joel Klein’s similar tactics: “And if you can’t fire them, make their lives miserable.” 

Instead of proposing a strategic plan for school reform, Fenty and Rhee continue to dismantle our educational landscape through massive terminations. What competent employees will be attracted to work in a system that regularly devalues and disrespects teachers and fails to retain an existing pool of experienced and certified educators?

Candi Peterson

Member, Board of Trustees,

Washington Teachers’ Union

Can gay marriage

be consummated?

Re: “Under the law, gay marriage is not physically possible,” May 20

I realize that the fact-checking standards for opinion columns are different from the standards at the news desk, but how could you possibly run Melanie Scarborough’s column today, “Under the law, gay marriage is not physically possible”?

Scarborough says that non-consummated marriages are invalid: “... the law does not consider the marriage valid unless it is consummated.” What nonsense; the “law” in every state is completely silent on whether married people must consummate their marriage.

It’s true that people can petition for an annulment citing impotence as grounds for the annulment, but the fact that impotence can be used as the basis for appealing for annulment does not remotely mean that impotent people lose their right to be married. Does she really believe that the state has a consummation test to determine whether a marriage is valid? How long do newly married couples have before they have to “do it” before they have to turn their marriage license back in? A week? A month? A year? The whole column is based on a ludicrous misunderstanding of the law.

Matt Petersen

Alexandria

I assume that Melanie Scarborough’s column “gay marriage is not physically possible” must be a joke. There is no law that says that married couples must consummate their marriage. I would assume that there have been many marriages that were never consummated in a way that could produce children.

What some law may say is that a marriage may be annulled for that reason but not that the marriage is invalid without it.

All the benefits and obligations of marriage accrue to any couple getting married no matter what their sexual proclivities are or aren’t unless one of the partners sues for divorce.

If what Scarborough claims were actually true we would need to have a bedroom police. Maybe it should be the IRS because they filed joint returns.

Or after one party died, the one inheriting would have to have a sex tape from the bedroom to prove their marriage was valid according to Scarborough, so some relative couldn’t suggest it wasn’t legal and have it annulled.

Peter D. Rosenstein

Washington, D.C.

Anarchy is starting to look like a good alternative

Black-clad punks throwing trash cans through storefront windows gives anarchy a bad name. It need not mean chaos and confusion.

It is worth noting that people do wonderful things when left to their own devices, when government just gets out of the way. Government tends to grow beyond its useful essentials and becomes a burden rather than a boon. Government at all levels has become self-serving and hostile to those it was meant to serve.

Our nation was founded on the concept of limited government. Now we have excessive government run amok.

No government at all is what we will get in a haphazard fashion if we don’t soon begin to limit government in an orderly way.

Don Grove

Silver Spring

DDT is currently being manufactured in India

I had the opportunity to accompany an Indian delegation on waste management that came to the World Bank last week. They also had discussions with the Environmental Protection Agency.

I was told that India still manufactures DDT, the pesticide that was banned in the United States three decades ago.

India, I am told, does not use DDT as a pesticide any more. However, they still use DDT to eradicate malaria by spraying it in places where the disease is found.

Daniel Chellaraj

Arlington