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Il l ■■ A ■ MB St BELIEF g i ßa i%i | i | #%ni ji ■ AL ♦ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2007 4A Daniel F. Evans President Editor and Publisher Julie B. Evans Vice President Softball support The billboard just down the hill from Perry High School reads something like: “Something new begins” and has a Perry Panther (symbolizing the football team bursting through it. Prophetic? Apparently. If you were at Peach County High School this past weekend and saw Perry beat the Trojans 48-28 your answer to that ques tion would be an emphatic: “Yes!” The win for the Panthers ended 18 years of frustra tion not only on the gridiron but deep within the heart of the community. As one coach put it a couple of years back as he stood on the sidelines before a game and frustratedly looked up at the empty bleachers one week following a loss to Peach County: “It doesn’t matter how suc cessful we are throughout the year. If we don’t beat Peach, people think we’ve failed.” That was, by the way, a year in which the Panthers finished 8-4, which included making it through to the second round of the state playoffs. No, you’re right. It shouldn’t be that way but it is, or has been, part of that mindset justifiable. After all, for many years now the road to the state title has led through Peach. There’s still a long way to go. Perry is 4-3 over all and 2-1 in the sub-region. It needs, however, only get past Southwest - currently with a 1-6 record - and Northeast - currently 5-2 overall and also 2-1 in the sub-region, and it’s entirely possible the Panthers could take the top seed (and guaranteed home games) into the post season. Yes, it’s true. In the most recent past, all roads to becoming AAA champions might have led through Fort Valley. Now, perhaps they will lead through Perry. Letters to the editor Congress should cultivate friends Turkey’s authorization of incursions into Iraq has many American congressmen upset; although it appears that Turkey is simply protecting its border - something the American Congress obviously does not understand. This bunch of Congressional do-nothings also wants to label the killing of Armenians, by Turks of the Ottoman Empire, as genocide. If the Turks actually did this, although nobody is around to testify, it only parallels America’s action during the American holocaust when the United States Army was sent out to eliminate the American Indians. What brand of muddleheaded idiots came up with the genocide idea anyway? Today, more than any other time in American history, the need for international friends, such as Turkey, is of the greatest importance. Congress should concentrate their efforts toward cultivating friends rather than enemies. Congress has again proven that stupidity is not a handi cap in American politics. Walter Huckeba, Perry Children should have been top priority I am a lifelong registered Democrat who lives in Houston County. I have voted for Representative Jim Marshall in the past, but I will not him in the upcoming election. I did not and do not support the undeclared war in Iraq. Yet I continued to support Marshall’s decision to vote otherwise. However, his vote against increasing health care coverage for children has caused me to cast my vote for someone else even if that person is in See LETTER, page 6A HOW TO SUBMIT: There are three ways to submit a letter to the editor: E-mail it to hhj@evansnewspapers.com, mail it to Houston Home Journal at 1210 Washington St., Perry, GA 31069, or drop it off at the same location between 8 a m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Letters should not exceed 350 words and must include the writer's name, address and telephone number (the last two not printed). The newspaper reserves the right to edit or reject letters for reasons of grammar, punctuation, taste and brevity. Foy S. Evans Editor Emeritus Don Moncrief Managing Editor "The win for the Panthers ended 18 years of frustration not only on the gridiron but deep within the heart of the community." Romney faces hurdles From my own and others’ experi ence, I’ve come to believe that a presidential candidate’s reli gion is usually thought to be a bigger deal with voters than it really is. Hubert Humphrey comes to mind. He was the Minnesota U.S. sena tor who almost became president in 1968. During a previous run for the White House in 1960, Humphrey was locked in a head-to-head showdown with John F. Kennedy in West Virginia. That state’s Democratic primary was considered the make-or-break indica tor of whether America would accept Kennedy’s Catholicism. Humphrey was running out of money and momentum, but he managed to buy time on a West Virginia TV station. He fielded questions - unscreened questions - from viewers on the tele phone. It all went wrong. The phone con nections wouldn’t broadcast properly. When they did, confusion reigned. That mishap symbolized Humphrey’s doomed candidacy. Kennedy won West Virginia and thereby squelched the idea that America feared a Kennedy White House would be subordinate to the Vatican. A new Insider Advantage/ Majority Opinion survey of 486 reg istered Republican voters in South Carolina hints that the Palmetto State may be a West Virginia-caliber hurdle for Mitt Romney’s candidacy. We asked: “Are you aware that Mitt Romney is of the Mormon faith?” Yes: 88 percent No: 12 percent Next, we asked: 2**7 Life, love and ... robots? Musings on the strange, heartening news of the day So much news ... So much worth commenting on .... There never seems to be a shortage of noteworthy reports or events these days. Instead of focusing on one issue this week, I’ve decided to muse on a few that have recently caught my attention. Here’s one for the “bizarre” file. A story published by Live Science reported on a British researcher who was just awarded a doctorate after he published a paper about marriage between humans and robots. Dr. David Levy sincerely believes that the day will come when men and women will actually marry robots. He points out that the technology to make machines appear more humanlike already exists. Not to mention the ability to program them with those essentials for mar riage, like shared interest and fond ness. He’s even gone so far as to predict that by the year 2050 Massachusetts will be the first state to legalize such marriage. Reading this left me unsure whether I should be amused, creeped out, or just plain scared. The proposition that humans would not only enter romantic relationships with robots, but also get married to them seems absurd, but not to Mr. Levy. He believes “once you have Matt Toweiy . Columnist Morris News Service “Would Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith make you more or less likely to vote for him in the South Carolina primary?” More likely: 13 percent Less Likely: 45 percent Don’t know/undecided: 42 percent The survey was conducted Oct. 17. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent, and has been weighted for age and gender. At face value, these numbers appear to make Romney’s effort in the first Deep South primary to be about more than just winning or losing X number of delegates. It could also signal wheth er the country as a whole is ready for a Mormon president. Romney has been portrayed by many in the GOP as the logical candidate for so-called “religious right” voters - those who might be disappointed that Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice and who also are aware that John McCain traditionally has problems in South Carolina. In fact, the son of the late Bob Jones of Bob Jones University endorsed Romney. That institution is a center for conser vative education in South Carolina and is known for it elsewhere. But Jones equivocated in his endorse ment of Romney. In essence, he said Randy Hicks Columnist Georgia Family Council a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon.” The author of the Live Science article made the interesting observation that the idea of having sex with a robot “might be considered geeky.” Geeky? Sitting at home all day playing with a Rubik’s Cube while watching Star Wars is geeky. I have a better adjective - it’s creepy! Perhaps one day such “marriages” will take place. I certainly hope they do not. There are always people in society who are willing to do anything, no mat ter how crazy it sounds to the rest of us, for the purpose of gaining attention or money. But the obvious fact remains that no matter how you fashion or program a machine, it cannot come anywhere close to matching human relationships, especially marriage. JflV A. Pi * lisT ? I A B' ' - B HOUSTON HOME JOURNAL he’s behind Romney because Romney has the best chance of winning the gen eral election for president. But Jones also explicitly rejected the tenets of the Mormon faith. Our poll shows that this two-sided endorsement may or may not help Romney. We asked a third question: “Are you aware that Bob Jones 111 has endorsed Mitt Romney for presi dent?” Yes: 58 percent No: 42 percent If you consider that at least one recent poll shows that Romney leads in . South Carolina with 26 percent of the Republican vote, then he may already have captured the top spot or be in a position to do so. Should a candidate’s religion mat ter in the 21st century? Certainly not. Does it matter? Probably not. Kennedy proved almost a half-cen tury ago that biases against certain religions can be overcome. But unlike Kennedy, whose Roman Catholic faith was considered a prominent issue early in the campaign, Romney has yet to face down the question of his “exotic” religion and its founding document, The Book of Mormon. When the presidential primary sea son accelerates into high gear and the gloves come off, the attacks on Romney and his religion will come - maybe through sneak attacks, like a thief in the night, but they will come. Romney, in today’s far wackier world, might get by with simply saying he has not nor will he ever watch HBO’s program about Mormons and polygamy, “Big Love.” It just might work. Marriage is an emotional, social and even spiritual union that cannot be duplicated by engineering or science. Marriage between man and machine would not just be a strange alterna tive—it would be a demeaning coun terfeit. Now one for the “softer side of family life” file. There was a heartwarming story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a family in Lawrenceville, Georgia, who adopted a little boy from China. Bill and Amanda Burke, though already the proud parents of three bio logical children followed through with a decade-long dream inspired by their Christian faith to adopt another child into their home. The Burkes said their action was in part a fulfillment of the Biblical call in James 1:27 that says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” It’s always exciting to hear about families who adopt. This is particu larly close to my heart as Marilyn and I have adopted five children of our own. What really caught my attention about See HICKS, page 6A