John Webster

Openly scorning the right of the public and the states to settle one of the toughest moral questions of our time, a federal court has invented from thin air a chilling new constitutional right - to physician-assisted suicide. This decision is judicial activism and federal arrogance at their worst. It seized the lawmaking role away from voters and the legislative branch of government and appropriated it for eight judicial ideologues at the notoriously liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The implications are profound - for the ill and elderly, for the medical profession, for the brutal climate of our cost-cutting health care system, for our already clogged courts, for the crumbling foundations of western ethics, and for presidential politics.

On Oct. 5, 1992, Dexter Amend appeared on the front page of the Spokesman-Review. It was a flattering story, about how the retired urologist organized a clinic at Spokane's Union Gospel Mission. There, he was dispensing a folksy mixture of medical aid and Bible verses to the homeless. This was a legacy that those who know him can remember with pride. Not so with the legacy he's leaving now. Instead of hearing and reporting compliments about his conduct, this newspaper has encountered a storm of complaints. Amend, now 76, was elected Spokane County Coroner in 1994. The manner in which he carries out this job attracts growing, serious criticism: from law enforcement officers, physicians, hospice workers, other coroners, nurses who monitor the death of children and the grieving family members of people who have died.

It hasn't exactly injured the reputation of Oxford, Harvard and the University of Washington to educate the next generations in classic old buildings that teach a history lesson from every cranny and pore of their gothic walls and marbled halls. For 85 years now, with a resonance that grows with every passing generation, Lewis and Clark High School has sent its message to young people of Spokane. When students walk through that magnificent arched doorway, the community is saying, you matter, and so does education. When they chatter with friends on those wide terrazzo floors, polished perhaps by their grandparents' feet, the building echoes, others have gone before you. As they rush to class, where a teacher their parents could have had marks the newest lessons of science on a century-old chalkboard, students pass paintings of the school's bold namesakes - paintings donated by the class of 1912. And if they listen closely, students sense those distant classmates saying, soon it will be up to you. Sure, the building is old. Its plumbing, wiring, and heating systems obsolete. Its location, close to a freeway. A few blocks away, and yet worlds away, lurks what adults delicately call the "downtown street culture."

Seemingly bent on copying the paralysis in Congress, Washington's Legislature has locked up over an important effort to reform laws that govern sentencing for juvenile crime. Juvenile crime cries out for action. Back in the '70s when current laws were written, Juvenile Court dealt mainly with miniature thieves. Today, however, it struggles with remorseless gangsters, rapists, murderers - and a horde of wannabes. Meanwhile, the rigid point system that governs juvenile sentencing has become a joke to street-wise offenders who know just how tightly judges' hands are tied. Some legislators want to keep dropping the age at which violent juvenile offenders must be transferred to adult court. But justice-by-the-numbers is a problem, not a solution.

It is with good reason that state laws elevate and protect marriage - and limit its privileges to the commitment between a man and a woman. Yes, there are other varieties of human sexual relationships, but none merits the shelter the law has built around marriage. Marriage is the fragile nest on which human life and social stability depend. In marriage, children find security, nourishment, training and role models and adults find lifelong purpose and stability. Terrible things ensued, for young and old alike, when pop culture began to paint heterosexual marriage as a cheap, old-fashioned lifestyle option.

When life got tough for 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis of Moses Lake, he reached for a rifle and started shooting. There is an echo of Barry Loukaitis in the hot, resentful politics of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. You poor, put-upon Americans, Buchanan tells his "troops." International bullies - foreigners and heartless corporations - are stealing what rightfully is yours. Let me take the power of government and punish your tormentors with tariffs, end foreign aid, build big fences and guard towers to keep foreigners where they belong. And under Old Glory's banner, let us march, Christian soldiers, into cultural war. Let us force our corrupt society onto paths of righteousness, for my name's sake.

More than 400,000 insurance consumers are getting hurt right now as a direct result of the Washington state Legislature's manipulation of the health insurance market. The 400,000 voters are those who buy individual health insurance policies. They work at businesses too small to offer group insurance. The cost of individual health coverage is high - and rising rapidly. Insurers who sell individual policies say they're suffering heavy losses and are seeking 20 percent to 30 percent rate increases. Rates for group health insurance, meanwhile, are comparatively flat.

Does this sound familiar? Checkbook in hand, legislators gallop to the rescue the very instant Western Washington demands $100 million for a ... nicer baseball stadium. When Eastern Washington seeks minor state investments in more legitimate public purposes such as education and a state museum, legislators freeze in their tracks, purse their lips like Puritan parsons, pinch the pennies in their pockets and preach dour sermons about fiscal prudence. The fact that it's Republicans who now engage in this charade, rather than the usual Democrats, only makes the hypocrisy more noticeable.

The pressure to end federal farm subsidies, an underpinning of this region's economy, will only grow more intense. If the subsidies are going to end, there may never be a better environment, or a fairer plan, than there is right now. Surprising a nation that has seen only paralysis from Congress and the president, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate has voted for a historic change in farm policy. The House, which supports the new approach, should go along rather than demanding even more radical changes that could cause this important legislation to collapse. And President Clinton, if he knows what's good for the economy and the federal budget, ought to sign the new approach into law.

When public school teachers go on strike, everybody suffers except the teachers. They still get paid for a full school year of work - though the school year might last into July. It's parents and kids who take it on the chin, during the strike and during the abbreviated summer. That's frustrating. No one's more frustrated than the parents outraged by last fall's 37-day teacher strike in Fife's public schools. It was the longest in Washington state history. What to do? The Legislature is looking for a solution. The House proposes simply to declare teacher strikes illegal. The Senate, meanwhile, has passed a bill requiring that if a local teacher union and school board cannot come to terms through negotiations, a three-member binding arbitration panel will settle the dispute.

Nazis were enforcing the law when they herded Jews into concentration camps. Southern plantation owners once asserted a legal right to own slaves. And some Spokane neighborhoods were built with legal covenants barring minorities from residing there. But there is a higher law than the law of statute books. There are higher rights than those mere litigiousness asserts. It is this higher class of law that several South Hill residents violated when they sued to block the opening of a group home for the elderly.

Shaking snow off their clothes, a delighted throng trooped through Spokane's brand-new South Hill branch library a few weeks ago, marveling at the good things the people of a community can do, together, when they vote yes. This greatly improved facility now puts books and literacy in a position to compete, vigorously, for the interest of the next generation and the edification of us older folks as well. On Tuesday, Spokane County voters said yes again. Loudly. They seemed to brush away the anti-government angst of our times as if it were the melting flakes of winter's final storm. School levies and bond issues, which two years ago were getting a chilly reception indeed, passed by huge approval margins, mostly in the 75 percent to 85 percent range.

One teacher died; one lived. Both of them, Leona Caires and Jon Lane, had gone to work Friday morning to show a commitment that usually gets taken for granted, at best. Both of them, by day's end, were heroes in a new and tragic way. When 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis stepped into a Moses Lake classroom with enough rage and firearms to kill scores of children, these two teachers risked their own lives to save their students. By the time Lane had wrestled a deer rifle from Loukaitis' hands, Caires and two students lay dying and a third student lay seriously wounded.

Gangs. Crack cocaine. A methamphetamine epidemic. Soaring juvenile and violent crime. Intense poverty. Threatened neighborhoods. Spokane has a crime problem. The city also has a top law enforcement expert, brim full of the latest ideas about how troubled cities most effectively address problems like ours. Police Chief Terry Mangan is a nationally respected innovator, lecturer, convention-goer, grant-chaser, networker and committee creature. But there is one innovation his well-traveled resume might not mention. Mangan's out of town so much he has had to perfect a new management technique: administration by voice-mail.

Good public schools are a part of the Spokane Valley's identity. They're a reason the Valley keeps attracting new homes, and desirable employers like Egghead Software. But for Valley schools to keep their reputation, they have to be expanded. On Tuesday, voters in all three Valley school districts will consider bond issues to cover classroom additions and building renovations that are needed to catch up with the Valley's rapid population growth. In a few previous elections, Valley voters rejected school expansion plans. Now, with guidance from neighborhood citizen committees, administrators have scaled back the proposals. Meanwhile, the need has grown. Strained old wiring recently caused an expensive electrical fire at Trent Elementary, slated for renovation. In West Valley's crammed elementaries, locker rooms house counselors and music classes. In growth areas like Liberty Lake, hundreds of children spend up to 1-1/2 hours a day on the bus, for lack of a neighborhood school the bonds would construct.

Every two years, Washington's school districts must go to the voters for renewal of the property tax levy that raises 20 percent of their operating costs. It's a healthy exercise. It reminds a community how essential public schools are to the local economy and to local young people. And it forces schools to heed local residents' concerns. So take a few minutes from your schedule next Tuesday, and vote. Before you do, think about the children you know and the schools near your home, because that's the issue.

Freedom of speech has remained a virtue, so far in our history, because there are some things most people just won't say or do in the presence of others who know them. But the Internet, unlike any communication medium society has confronted, is exempt from the selfregulating power of personal accountability. Users can distribute or receive material in complete anonymity. There is no shame, no editing, no reponsibility to be truthful, no need to face a dissenting idea that might expose a misconception. While television took 30 years to become a sewer, the Internet is a bottomless pit, by definition. Child-raping pornographers, slanderers, con artists, sex predators, copyright violators, political terrorists, Nazis, demagogues and criminal conspiracies have, in this medium, a wide-open opportunity.

Still fighting the last war, Bob Dole glowered at the television camera Tuesday night and rasped that the U.S. government has been "hijacked by liberals." Minutes earlier, Dole's fellow soldiers had sat on their hands through a rousing speech that signaled their triumph in the war against liberalism. "The era of big government is over," President Bill Clinton proclaimed. Item by item he ran through a State of the Union address that could, for the most part, bring a GOP presidential nominating convention roaring to its feet. But a Democrat was talking, so all the Republicans could do was splutter about stolen lines and gripe that Clinton doesn't walk the conservative walk as authentically as they do.

Suppose the United States junked its welfare culture, the breeding ground for human dependency and social decay. No more disincentives to work. No more cash incentives to have babies. No more manipulation of the courts and Congress to enforce the pathetic "right" to a handout. No more cold, secular bureaucracies that distribute cash in lieu of kindness, paperwork in lieu of guidance toward a behavior change. To build a better system, Americans need a successful model. Few are more intriguing than the system operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Voters in farm country played a big role in sending a Republican majority to Congress. Their reward? A role as victim in a political train wreck. Certainly, many with a long view hope Congress and President Clinton eventually might enact the GOP's plan to phase out federal crop subsidies and rules. And eventually, a pig might learn to fly. But in the meantime, spring is coming. Farmers and their bankers need to make decisions, soon, regarding what they'll plant and spend.

Look out, social conservatives - politicians are playing games with you. More laws, more rights, more lawsuits, more regulation and more paperwork are not the answer to your problems - or society's. Aiming to curry favor with the good religious voters who had a lot to do with the new Republican majorities in Congress and the statehouses, some politicians are striking a heroic pose as advocates for parental-rights legislation.

The Spokane economy needs more family-wage jobs. Many business leaders consider this the area's No. 1 goal. With good reason. A low-wage economy has profound impact on consumer buying power, crime and social problems, and government's ability to raise revenue for services from police to paving to parks. But how can family-wage jobs be created?

When the Spokane School Board hired Superintendent Gary Livingston, it asked him to open the schools to greater public involvement. That was a wise and timely priority. Like all government institutions these days, public schools hear calls for reform. The many concerns have as much to do with the families and the society from which kids come, as they do with educational methods. We can't think of a better way to address these concerns than together, as a community, with open, participative democracy - the very approach Livingston and the school board want, and have demonstrated in important ways.

You might think the Republican Party's True Believers could tell the difference between second-rate bumbling and big-league corruption - being experts on the subject themselves. But no. The elephants are squealing as if they've found a tiger in the camp. Sorry, it looks more like a mouse.