Letters to the editor: Cougar Island, abortion laws, voting GOP and Bundy in Boise

Cougar Island

Idaho Department of Lands has divided Cougar Island in Payette Lake into five residential lots and put them up for auction on Sept. 14. Payette Lake is the sole drinking water source for the McCall area and the sewage from these lots will harm this water.

Cougar Island’s IDL plat states that sewer is “installed and existing within the lots shown,” but this is false. Instead, IDL’s appraiser’s reports say composting or incinerator toilets must be used on most lots because of failed soil percolation tests. What a contrast.

Unlike Idaho, most states do not allow or heavily regulate composting toilets, because of contaminants in residual waste. Incinerator toilets burn the waste; however, in lakeshore areas, where temperature inversions are common, they cause serious odor problems.

Both toilets treat only human excrement and urine. Nowhere is the treatment of greywater (wastewater from sinks, showers, washing machines, etc.) considered. Greywater contains toxic chemicals, phosphorus, nitrogen, and pathogens. Its treatment necessarily requires soil absorption, which the failed percolation tests show will result in contaminants leaching into Payette Lake.

There is only one conclusion: The State Land Board must act now to stop the ill-conceived, short-sighted Cougar Island lot auctions.

Margaret Watson, McCall

Abortion law

Special attorney for the Legislature argued Idaho’s “trigger law” would never find anyone “stupid” enough to enforce its provisions since the statute’s definitions were understood to be “conceptual as opposed to the practical.” We understand that pregnancy also begins with a conceptual event, as opposed to the sudden appearance of a fully finished product of conception commonly known as a baby. We would all agree that babies do indeed demand the practicalities of parenting. But must the same be said of every embryo and fetus? Does every conception now demand a name?

Pregnancy is a complex formerly private process, not a static state, occurring along a continuum commonly known as life. The proper question for the Idaho legislature to ask is: At what stage during pregnancy, if any, must a liberty-loving state require its free citizens to relinquish their right to exercise their own moral and religious authority?

Radically over-reaching Republicans deploy a quasi-religious/police state to redefine the concept of moral authority into a spiritually stunted caricature of someone’s misconception of Christianity. Thereby the legislature trains us to scoff at laws that cruelly demean and disrespect the practical application of our own freely chosen religious views in our own lives.

Jane Crosby, Boise

Voting GOP

Ha-ha, they sure fooled you, GOP voters. A recent poll by the Idaho Education Association showed, by huge margins, as much as 75-89%, how much GOP voters supported local and state public education. I believe their sincerity but I sure question why they are voting GOP.

Our state legislature has so many GOP anti-education extremists in it who are out to do and have done damage to Pre-K through higher education, coming for course content, teachers, librarians, administrators and funding.

Note to GOP voters, your party left you long ago. They are in it for power for themselves and whatever tax breaks and other favors they can do for corporations and the rich. If you care about educating your kids and society as much as the poll indicates, as well as many other issues that actually help you, then time to look at the party with a real track record of policies that help the average Idahoan: the Democratic party.

Otherwise, just keep on being fooled and fooling yourselves.

Dallas Chase, Boise

Bundy in Boise

The United States and Idaho constitutions enshrine the inalienable rights of man (and woman), especially freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. Boise Mayor Lauren McLean has chosen, instead, to deny those rights to a peaceful political rally by the Ammon Bundy for Governor Campaign. This is tyranny! These rights are constitutionally guaranteed, regardless of whether the Boise city mayor and city officials agree with Ammon Bundy or any other Idaho citizen’s political views. Rest assured, Ammon Bundy never would trample your inalienable rights to speech and peaceable assembly, regardless of your diametrically opposed political views.

Shame on you, Mayor McLean, and shame on anyone who suppresses freedom of speech and assembly or stands idly by while such rights are denied.

Elizabeth Olson, Eagle