Readers Write: Vance Boelter, academia, starter homes, capitalism

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Last Sunday’s “Devout Christian, alleged assassin” headline should more accurately have read: “Alleged Christian, devout assassin.” Vance Boelter was most certainly not a devout Christian. He was a performative one at best, with a distorted understanding of the teachings of Jesus. Christianity teaches love, not hate; peace, not violence; and acceptance of all people without prejudice. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Judge not lest you be judged,” “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Love your enemies.” That is how a devout Christian strives to live. And it is how decent peace-loving people, regardless of religion, want to live.

Sally Pundt, Minneapolis

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The piece profiling the alleged killer of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her spouse offers a subtly distorted image of a terrorist. If this killer were (fill in the blank) Muslim, Black, Hispanic, Somali, Hmong, Jewish, Hindu or other ethnic or religious minority, the reporting would be very different. It’s time for this publication to recognize and name the deadly threat posed by the deranged followers of apocalyptic ideologies for what they are and the menace posed by the continued normalization of this behavior. Children raised to believe in magic, threatened with damnation and hellfire, repressed by rigid authority and then offered weapons of war, do precisely what we might expect. This meticulously planned attack lays bare a plan that was a lifetime in the making. Similar behavior can be observed in places like Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and any number of other places around the globe that we view with horror while we foster the same conditions just down the road in that nice church filled with those nice people all dressed up in nice clothes.

Blinding ourselves to the facts while wrapping our horror in an “it can’t happen here” denial simply buries the solutions along with the bloody remains of the immediate victims.

George Hutchinson, Minneapolis

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I suspect that you will get a lot of pushback regarding the headline “Devout Christian, alleged assassin.” However, I think it is right on and about time the media speaks clearly. Too many who claim to be devout Christians are anything but. Espousing hatred, promoting or committing violence is not Christian. The Fifth Commandment says “Thou shalt not kill,” and Christ’s life was one of compassion, kindness and tolerance. It is way past the time for the clergy of all faiths to call out as unfaithful those whose behaviors are the exact opposite of their religious teachings.

Harvey Leviton, Minneapolis

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It was welcome news to read that religious leaders are distancing themselves from the repugnant actions of Boelter. Despite their disavowal, there is a radicalizing element to their fundamentalist message if they preach that achieving eternal salvation is more important than righteous conduct in this life. Jesus kept it simple so there would be no confusion: Love God and love one another. Obtaining God’s favor in the afterlife specifically does not include political assassination nor abortion clinic bombings, etc. To avoid radicalizing future criminals, out on the fringe as they may be, religious teaching needs to be made more clear on this point.

Bob Worrall, Roseville

As someone who grew up as a “townie” in Northfield and later became an academic, I read “Northfield blends blue, red, higher ed” (June 22) with great interest. It left me wishing for further exploration of the story’s economic dimensions, such as, how does the change in the median cost of college compare to the increased cost of the average car in the U.S. during the same period? Can we understand in greater detail the factors that have driven the rise in property taxes in Northfield? How has rapid growth, the ongoing suburbanization and expansion of the Twin Cities, as well as demographic change across Minnesota, contributed to these shifts?

In my own university town, Charlottesville, Va., the significant rise in our property taxes has been driven primarily by the influx of wealthy, non-university folks moving here, including alumni who stay or move back to town. They are drawn by Charlottesville’s economic stability, natural beauty and cultural dynamism, much like Northfield. As a result, many staff and faculty colleagues have been priced out of town. Given these dynamics, it is perplexing that academics have been increasingly derided as the new American elite, rather than hedge fund financiers, real estate moguls or tech CEOs.

Sheila Crane, Charlottesville, Va.

The Star Tribune’s June 22 story “The Twin Cities in the Gilded Age” was interesting and informative but limited by the anti-free-enterprise narrative inescapable in our media these days. Let me add a Ph.D. historian’s perspective.

Yes, there were unprecedented fortunes made between 1870-1890 in the U.S., but only because the entrepreneurs of those days — almost all self-made men and women, like James J. and Mary Hill — became rich by building businesses that offered needed goods and services more cheaply than ever before and employed millions at wages never before earned, certainly not by those American immigrants from semi-feudal European regimes and from the post-slavery South.

American productivity grew four times faster from 1870 to 1913 than in the years before the Civil War, doubling per capita output over the prior period, and lifted tens of millions into the middle class, then and later.

Twin Cities immigrants may have started their new lives with no plumbing in Swede Hollow or Bohemian Flats, but they or their children or grandchildren learned trades, went to college or started businesses and now often have suburban homes with yards, two- or three-car garages and maybe even a pool. Those so-called “robber barons” made that possible!

Meanwhile, all of the scores of socialist “utopian communities” founded all over America before the Civil War floundered and failed (“Oneida community,” one of them, is now the logo of flatware made in China). Three cheers for American capitalism!

Douglas P. Seaton, Minnetonka

I really appreciated Evan Ramstad’s article about the struggles facing small housing builders (“The story of building new housing is rarely short,” June 22). Steve Furlong, a Bloomington homebuilder, is actively working to address our housing shortage — explicitly attempting to create affordable housing — and in spite of his best efforts, he was delayed, prices rose and the homes became more expensive than he wanted.

The costs of homebuilding materials and labor are high, and growing. Furlong is exactly the kind of community-minded developer that our cities ought to be encouraging, but the cities’ red tape kept his work in limbo as prices climbed. This situation could have been streamlined if he’d had the benefits of the Starter Homes Act, part of the “Yes to Homes” bills package that didn’t pass this year. It gave homebuilders a standardized set of regulations to follow everywhere in the state — meaning builders would’ve had a consistent baseline of rules everywhere. Instead of doing back flips to meet the requirements of two different cities on borderline locations like Furlong’s, or learning an entirely new set of codes to build in a neighboring suburb, homebuilders would have the freedom to start building in the places and moments when it most makes sense to them.

More homes means teachers who can afford to live in the districts they teach and young adults raising families in the communities they grew up in. We need to encourage more builders like Furlong by passing legislation that unbinds their hands so they can create the next generation of great homes!

Alana Hawley, St. Paul