LETTERS: Students also need social education

To the editor:

Sex education is very much needed in all Nevada high schools. We also need to teach safe living and correct social skills in all schools. When we see domestic abuse, hit-and-run crimes, gang problems, pregnancy and dropout problems among our teens as a daily condition of life, it is time to make improvements.

Students in elementary school can be taught how to treat others with respect and kindness. They can be taught how to deal with anger issues and how families should live together peacefully. They should know without a doubt that they can report abuse to someone without putting themselves in more danger. Our schools can and should do these things.

We will have to put other lessons on hold until social improvement is taught and learned, or there won’t be many students left alive to teach.

We can start teaching sixth-graders what life would be like if they bring a baby into the picture. Encourage students to reach for their dreams of the future; they can have families when they are grown and prepared to raise children.

Yes, they need sex education so they will know where babies come from. They need to know how to care for a baby and themselves, and how to love and respect everyone in the family, especially when things are stressful. Most of all, Nevada schools need to come out of the Dark Ages. If a girl gets pregnant, every effort should be made to keep her in school. Be sure she gets parenting classes (the father should also) and monetary help if it’s needed, and encourage her in every possible way to become a good parent and citizen.

These lessons outweigh all other lessons, because they are about how to live a decent life. Unfortunately, many parents never learned these lessons, so they don’t teach their children. It’s time to end this lack of knowledge. Let’s teach, already.

LOIS WHITE

NORTH LAS VEGAS

Failing presidency

To the editor:

Barack Obama is looking at a failed presidency due to three hot-button issues: the Keystone XL pipeline, health care and immigration, all three of which will likely result in showdowns with the Republican-controlled Congress. Two of those topics — health care and immigration — could result in showdowns with the Supreme Court as early as the middle of next year.

President Obama doesn’t care. He won’t be on the ticket in 2016. And he has a big trump card, an immunity idol which emboldens him to bait the Republicans into fights. As the first African-American president, he is impeachment-proof, regardless of how much he overreaches or usurps his executive authority. So he thinks.

But election-year politics is never that simple. The Democratic Party’s heir apparent is Hillary Clinton, if she chooses to run. Her winning the White House is contingent on the president’s legacy. If his popularity falls too far — and it will if he fractures the country with a constitutional crisis on one or all of these issues — Mrs. Clinton (or whomever the party’s nominee is) suffers in 2016.

Add President Obama’s failed foreign policies to the mix, and he will lead the Democratic Party over the proverbial cliff into the abyss.

CARMINE A. DIFAZIO

NORTH LAS VEGAS

Gruber right about voters

To the editor:

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped to create President Barack Obama’s health care plan, might have a point about the “stupidity” of American voters. People complain about how dysfunctional Congress is. Approval ratings for Congress have been extremely for a few years now, and yet about 85 percent of Congress gets re-elected. Is that smart?

ELEU TABARES

LAS VEGAS