Letters to the editor July 20

Property rights

I’m worried about the added traffic and load on services induced by the Flathead Lake Club. I hate seeing a private enclave for rich people only.  

However they own the land and this complies with zoning. It will certainly add tax revenue to the county and the developers seem willing to help mitigate infrastructure concerns. Would I prefer they open the restaurants and golf courses to the public? Of course. But they don’t have to, it’s their land.

They are being countered by an organized group of NIMBYs who will oppose any development anywhere without any counter proposals.

I don’t see why this project would not be approved.

— Steve Regis, Lakeside

‘Real’ Republicans

As a lifelong Republican activist who has served Glacier, Hill and Flathead as a precinct committeewoman I am disgusted at the small mindedness of our current leadership. The “real” Republicans are still pushing for a litmus test.  They sound like Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” where everything was community think, community dress, community everything. What happened to Reagan’s big tent which served so well at the ballot box?  

 — Mitzi Anderson, Whitefish

Principles

The Declaration of Independence wrote that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” 

Aside from the fact that the young congressmen who composed The Declaration did not even consider that women might also have rights, the fact that they realized the rights of enslaved African Americans and Indigenous Peoples equal in a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich white men for so long, was a radical concept. 

Eighty-seven years later, the Civil War was fought by southern white men who wanted to return the nation to one where only white southern men held power. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his famous Gettysburg Address in 1863, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”

The U.S. did endure and continued to challenge and accept that “all men” included African Americans, other peoples of color, and eventually women. The 19th Amendment gave white women the right to vote in 1920. It took 45 years later for all women to secure that right with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Since then, American men and women have sacrificed their lives in order to defend human equality. 

The MAGA policies of this administration and this Republican party once again seek to reshape America into a nation in which a few white rich powerful men are better than others. 

This One Big Beautiful Bill is punishing Americans who don’t have enough money to put food on the table or pay for health care. American citizens and those who have come to this country to find work because they believed in the promise of America are being arrested and imprisoned because they are not white and rich, or because they question the actions of this administration. 

On this Fourth of July, as I reflect on this history, we as Montanans are once again being challenged to decide if the principles that this nation was founded on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all who come to live in this nation, are worth fighting for. 

And as Lincoln asked Civil War Americans, will our nation have a “new birth of freedom” and that government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

— Susan Cahill and Steve Martinez, Kalispell