By Harold Henderson
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“I was getting stopped by police so much that I used to compute the time of my stop into my travel time,” Chicago’s Salim Muwakkil tells Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post National Weekly (April 8-14). “Out of 10 trips, I would say that I would be stopped at least five times.” Adds Fletcher, “Muwakkil thinks he was being stopped for what he sardonically calls DWB–driving while black.” Now he has a strategy: “He rents a bland-colored Taurus rather than a flashy Mustang, strictly obeys the speed limit and definitely does not don his black beret.”
In peril on Chicago Avenue. Micah Marty in Context (April 15): “I recall the experience of a friend who was walking on Chicago Avenue near Moody Bible Institute and heard a group of Moody students behind her. ‘I saved a man’s soul right here last Thursday night,’ one of the students told the others as they passed in front of a nightclub. ‘He came out that door and I helped him find the Lord right here on the sidewalk.’ One of the other students asked what motivated him to make the effort at that particular time and place, and he responded that the Spirit must have moved him but added, ‘Of course, I also did it for extra credit in Dr. A.’s Personal Evangelism class.’”
“The free market is better for gays than democracy,” argues Paul Varnell in Windy City Times (April 11). “In the economic marketplace, when you cast your ‘dollar vote’ for the product you want, you get the product you want. That is, you win no matter what other people do with their dollar votes, and your approval registers economically with the firm whose product you bought. In the political marketplace, you get what you want only if half of all the other voters already agree with you. If you voted for a losing side, you get nothing. And your candidate gets no reward for making outreach to you. In fact, he may be being penalized. In short, the economic marketplace fosters a pluralism of values and a plurality of results–i.e., a variety of ways of living. In the political marketplace, the winner’s values are imposed on the losers….Which of these better benefits minorities like gays seems clear.”
