God celebrates

all relationships
Thank you for an eminently sensible editorial supporting a domestic partner registry for same-gender couples. Why two people of any sex who declare their love and commitment to each other should be called an “affront to God” shows the narrow limits that some conservative people attribute to their God. My God is big enough to celebrate my lesbian daughter and my gay son in their relationships just as God cares for my two straight children in theirs.
A same-gender relationship in no way diminishes traditional heterosexual families; a law that fosters stability and equal justice for all can only be right.
Regarding the bathrooms for transgender people, I just returned from two months in France and found that in several situations, bathrooms were “unisex.” Sometimes I didn’t even know this, and it was a bit disconcerting for this 65-year-old woman to exit a stall and find a man standing at a urinal, but it made a lot of sense. Nobody seemed to see it as a problem; in fact, if I had a young boy with me, I might prefer to be with him in the bathroom.
We Americans are just too damn hung up on sex to look at things rationally sometimes. Here’s hoping that the good people of Eugene will move several steps ahead of those in Houston.

Sue Null

Houston

U.S. gives unfair

treatment to Canadians
Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer, was returning to Canada when he was arrested at a layover in New York on Sept. 26 and deported Oct. 11 by the United States to Syria. He avoided military service in Syria by leaving when he was a child with his family to Canada. Now he is missing in Syria, probably in prison, perhaps being tortured to teach him a lesson.
This is against all international law. If deported, he should have been sent to Canada, or to the country he was last in, Switzerland.
Does the United States remember that Canadian officials hid U.S. embassy officials in Iran after the U.S. Embassy was stormed? Does the United States know the job Canadians have been doing in Afghanistan to fight al-Qaida for the last year? Why is the United States treating Canadians so badly and so illegally?
The United States should find Arar in Syria and return him to his family.

Tom Trottier

Ottawa, Canada

Capitalism is priceless
Buy a book at the University of Oregon Bookstore: pay $120. Sell book back for $7. Receive less than 10 percent of your investment, but be grateful for 10 percent savings to begin with. Watch as the bookstore marks book back up by more than 65 percent!
Experiencing consumerism through book-selling monopoly at exorbitant prices: loss of $113.
Understanding financial raping thinly veiled as capitalism:
priceless?

Celeste Burns

junior

sociology