Letters to the editor March 13

Inflation is what is causing gas prices to rise

You can still buy a gallon of gas for a quarter. The reason gasoline prices are so high is not because of commodity speculators or because of hoarding in full oil tankers at anchor off the coasts or because of the lack of new exploration and drilling in and around the United States.

The price of oil and everything else is affected by the expanding demand of middle class populations emerging around the world, but this is not the problem either.

The problem is the insidious erosion of the buying power of the U.S. dollar. It now takes $7 to buy what $1 bought in 1965, or it takes a whole dollar to buy what 14 cents bought in 1965. It was no coincidence that the huge increases in price happened in 1974, when the oil producers woke up to the consequences of Richard Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard world-wide in 1971. This was a big dip in the slide of the dollar, which began when Franklin Roosevelt eliminated the gold standard internally in the U.S. in 1933.

So the real silver United States Quarter Dollar is still worth a gallon of gas. The scary part is that no government has ever survived the inflation of its currency. That is why diminishing the value of U.S. currency was a death penalty offense at the beginning of our country. The more dollars the Federal Reserve prints, the higher the price of gas.

Charles Gillies

Minden

Contraception mandate

is unconstitutional

The recent Health and Human Services ruling mandates insurance coverage of birth control pills, surgical sterilization and abortion-causing medications such as ELLA and RU-486. For many, not just Catholics, these actions are abhorant and immoral. I believe it bad medicine as well as an infringement of our First Amendment rights.

Recently, the New York Times said that 98 percent of Catholic women have used contraception. They may not be aware of the Catholic church's teaching. Conversely, they may elect to use birth control pills or sterilize themselves anyhow.

Ninety-eight percent of people speed or have disobeyed parents. That doesn't prove it's moral.

Those 98 percent using family planning included those employing natural methods of periodic abstinence. A huge difference exists between methods using the woman's natural cycles to time sexual relations, versus unnatural steroid chemicals overriding the woman's cycle, which have significant consequences, such as serious blood clots, liver tumors, cancer and death.

Surgical sterilizations are procedures designed to remove or impede the function of our normal fertility/organs.

One potential action of the pill is similar to ELLA and RU-486. Presuming the embryo has already formed, they are designed to make the uterus unable to sustain life; therefore abortion causing.

It is understandable to mandate administering vaccines for children using public schools to minimize the risk of certain communicable diseases. However, pregnancy is not a disease; therefore, mandating medications and surgical procedures preventing pregnancy is not only bad medicine, it should not be considered constitutional.

Keith Shonnard, MD and Tracy Muscari, MD

Carson City