JENNIFER LUDDEN, HOST:
It's Tuesday and time to read from your comments. Last week, we discussed ethnic mapping and the deepening controversy over New York Police Department efforts to monitor and map Muslim communities. Paul Kennedy from Houston, Texas, expressed what we heard from many of you. He wrote: Ethnic mapping is intrusive and violates the rights of the citizenry to be free from government interference. There is no justification for what the NYPD is doing. These folks did nothing wrong. The presumption by law enforcement is that these folks are guilty of something unless proven otherwise. He continued: Timothy McVeigh was a white Christian. Did the police map out where white Christians ate, drank, prayed and slept?
And when we talked about the increase in divorce among older couples, a number of you echoed Linda who didn't tell us where she was writing from. She said: I'm in my early 60s. I understand that a number of folks my age are divorcing to avoid losing everything when one spouse or another gets a huge medical bill. I jokingly tell my friends, if you read my name in the paper as divorced, it isn't because my husband and I don't love one another, it's because medical costs have become impossible to meet.
After the recent controversy over birth control, health coverage and the Catholic Church, writer Soraya Chemaly wrote that she had left the Catholic Church because of its treatment of women, and she suggested that other women do the same. Anna Mary King emailed this response from Lebanon, Illinois: I am a practicing Catholic who, like your guest, strongly disagrees with the patriarchal hierarchy of the church. But unlike your guest, I am making a conscious decision to work to change from within the church. To me, the church is my little community of likeminded believers with whom I worship every week, not the council of men who run the church from their palaces thousands of miles away from here. They are out of touch, literally and figuratively. I love being Catholic, and I am not living my church because of a disagreement over ideology, that is, for the most part, manmade.
Our discussion about Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony who's the subject of a video released last week, which has now been viewed by tens of millions of people worldwide brought this email from Lynn Bergeson in Minnesota. She wrote: When I was in Uganda and South Sudan two years ago, with about 20 other pastors, we learned of Joseph Kony and saw some of the devastation he'd left in his wake. He and his band of soldiers had been burning down entire villages. They raped, tortured and slaughtered people indiscriminately and abducted young boys to serve in his personal militia. Terror, fear and evil hung heavy in the air, and the refugees around us were nervous and terrified. The 30-minute video being shown on the Internet does not begin to tell the heinous story of Joseph Kony.
As always, if you have questions, comments or corrections for us, the best way to reach us is by email, talk@npr.org. If you're on Twitter, you can also follow us there, @totn. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.