No valid arguments against EPA rules
Regarding “EPA rules will hurt Georgians” (Opinion, July 9), let’s get this straight: There is no valid argument against the EPA ruling to lower carbon emissions. Thousands of good jobs await along with the fantastic innovations to provide the energy we want. The ones crying “foul” now are the same ones who are going to have to compete in the energy market instead of monopolizing it. This EPA ruling is simply the right thing to do. Let’s not tolerate wave upon wave of wasteful legal challenges.
MARTIN MCCONAUGHY, ATLANTA
Multiple transit rides to get home
The issue of public transportation may seem abstract until it’s personalized. While picking up food at a Chick-Fil-A on Johnson Ferry Road near Lower Roswell Road, I was approached by a man who asked for a ride to a bus stop. As I drove us south on Johnson Ferry, he showed me the nearby bus stop for a discontinued bus route once run by Cobb County Transit. The temperature was over 90 degrees that day, and that man, whom I judged to be in his 50s at least, would have had to walk miles to reach the first of multiple transit rides he needed to reach his home in the Six Flags area.
He worked for a janitorial firm and had worked nine days straight. He complimented the air conditioning in my car, and, after a few minutes, I realized that he had fallen asleep. I took him all the way to the MARTA station at Perimeter Center. It was easy for me as I was headed that way anyway. He thanked me politely, and we parted — I, a little wiser about the problems of those who cannot afford automobiles in our sprawling city.
TOM WALKER, ROSWELL
Justices wrongly extend personhood
The most pernicious aspect of the Hobby Lobby decision is not the ability to deny certain methods of birth control to its employees. The worst part of the decision is the expansion of the Supreme Court’s already fallacious extension of the definition of personhood to corporations. Corporations are not people. They are born and sometimes they die, but they are not people.
Corporations exist to make money. They used to exist to make products or offer services, but that seems to have taken a back seat to wheeling and dealing and buying and selling to increase stock prices. Extending the concept of personhood to corporations in the Citizens United decision, and then doubling down on that bad analogy in the Hobby Lobby decision, will lead us down a slippery slope best described by Leonard Pitts as “a San Francisco sidewalk covered in ice and littered with banana peels.”
CAROLINE KNIGHT, ATLANTA
