Letters to the Editor by Debbie Broome

October 14, 2021 - Stop prayer at public meetings

     I am writing on behalf of the 24% of citizens in Pinal County who do not claim affiliation with any faith. The Pinal County Board of Supervisors opens its public meetings with a Christian prayer, which gives the impression that we have a Christian rather than a secular government. Many counties have no opening prayers or invocations, and it does not affect their ability to govern. This is the key point.

Why include something divisive if you don’t have to? Since this practice is not done in special sessions or work sessions, it appears that the prayer is done for the benefit of the audience.

     We indeed are a melting pot, and whether we like it or not, we must learn to be tolerant. We have many colors, ethnic groups, nationalities, sizes, levels of education, degrees of intelligence, layers of complexity, amplitudes of kindness and diverse religious practices.

     Our government has made it clear from the beginning that religion was not to be a factor in the governing process. And yet it is, and always has been, because that is our nature. However, I propose that governing without religion is not only possible but much more desirable. The laws govern everyone, not just Christians.

     How about just a moment of silence? 

May 20, 2021 - The Goofy Old Party

     The Republican Party — once called the Grand Old Party — today should be called the Goofy Old Party. Not goofy in a fun way but dangerously goofy. We all know the national cast of characters from the “Stable Genius” to the “Grim Reaper” and on and on.

     But we need look no further than Arizona’s ludicrous election “audit” of Maricopa County to find local evidence of “GOP” goofiness. Only a goofy political party would authorize the turnover of public election records, ballots and election machines to a private company for any reason. To make matters goofier, this is the work of Republican leadership in the Arizona Senate. Apparently, no vote was taken on this goofiness. Surely a vote of the full Senate should be required for anything of this magnitude pertaining to an election.

     We all know the “audit” is being conducted by a private company called, goofily enough, Cyber Ninjas. The name itself conjures images of bamboo. This company is reported to have never audited an election. From most accounts it will not be able to claim that it has done so when it finishes its current activity. Few will respect the result of this exercise in goofiness or its final goofy report — if there is one — purporting to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to election integrity in Maricopa County in 2020.

     The actions of today’s “GOP” seriously undermine our democracy and our political and electoral systems. We all will be affected by this infringement on the sanctity of our ballots and possibly our private information if the “GOP” can get it. The goofiest thing is they probably can. The next goofiest thing is some people will still vote for the Goofy Old Party.

     The ex-president of the United States has been 86’d from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Think about that for a minute. How bad do you have to be to be banned from social media, which will let just about anybody say anything about everything?

     This is what our country has come to and it’s disgraceful. Everything seems to be acceptable now — lying, bullying, more lying, sedition, killing and more lying. We allow people like Paul Gosar to infect the halls of Congress pretending to be a representative of the people. Horseradish.

     Gosar encouraged the mob that stormed the Capitol building and continues to agitate against the norms of our democratic republic. Through these actions Congressman Gosar has shown that he is not fit to protect the Constitution and needs to be removed from his congressional role. If no consequence is given for seditious acts they will continue, and the fabric of our country will unravel. His own family practically begged us to conduct an intervention back in 2018.

     I’m so glad I’m not raising kids during these awful times. I wouldn’t know what to say to them about the former president or the people that follow him. They have forfeited the high ground that they used to claim and no longer can cite family values as belonging to the Republican Party. All they are now is the party of mean-spirited goofballs who live by alternative facts. (Oh, and they claim to be concerned about the deficit.) As a Republican, my dad is probably rolling in his grave right about now.   

     Voting by mail has been under attack, mainly by the Republican Party. They rely on scare tactics to try to dissuade us from using this convenient method of voting in hopes that this will somehow work out in favor of their candidates. Mr. Trump is obsessed with “rampant” voter fraud (which is almost non-existent, statistically speaking), and insists that mail-in voting favors Democrats. There is no evidence that either of these things is true.

     After studying voter fraud for years, the Heritage Foundation (a right-leaning think tank) submitted a report that stated that “proven voter fraud cases swell to 1,295 in America” (in all of America, and that was over several years!). This is not enough to swing an election. And the task force that Trump created to investigate the issue after his 2016 election was disbanded after the first year because they found so few cases that it wasn’t worth it.

     Vote-by-mail is necessary and helpful. This year going to the polling place is a potentially dangerous undertaking, so why not employ a service that we already have? We can do it this way so why not do it this way? So many more people would be interested in becoming part of the process instead of being a victim of it if they could avoid the risk and perhaps intimidation of voting in person. You can still request a mail-in ballot by going to https://servicearizona.com/ or https://azsos.gov/votebymail, which gives deadlines and ways to request a ballot.

     Have we, as a country, worked through the mistaken notion that a “businessman” will be a successful president? It was always a mystery to me why so many people thought this was a legitimate way to assess someone’s talent and ability to take on the massively difficult job of running the U.S. government.

    Sure, entrepreneurial talent is valuable, but does it prove any real understanding of economics or even government? Businesses are competitive — that’s the whole point of a free-market economy, and that’s a good thing. But why do we believe the myth that success in business translates directly to competence in politics? It sounds like we think that politics is simple, that anybody can just get in there and fix everything just because he is the “outsider,” that he’ll come in and shake things up and get everything straightened out. We’ve lent legitimacy to the idea that success in politics comes from things like “common sense” and “American values,” and that’s absurd. This isn’t a family of four — it’s a country of 328 million.

    Politics is extremely complex, and that’s what makes it interesting. And yes, there are the standard depictions of politicians as snakes, bottom feeders, knuckleheads, scammers, money-wasting scoundrels, crooks, etc., but there are businessmen who could fit into those categories too.

    So let’s hope that we’ve learned our lesson that real estate familiarity can be helpful, but we might get a little closer to what we want if we take other qualifications into account, like political experience, education, general knowledge of history and government, years of service to our country, and yes, overall decency.