SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Letter: If the virus kills you, the fight for your rights becomes moot
By Kerry Soelberg | The Public Forum
| Sep. 29, 2021, 6:00 a.m.
My perspective on the COVID-19 crisis begins with this: Our principal foe is not mandates for masks or vaccines but the delta variant and its more virulent successors. As a lifelong conservative, this is the most conservative perspective I can find.
I have listened to complaints that mask or vaccine mandates are a brazen government effort to steal away our rights. I am unable to see that kind of malice from the health department or the school district. While I am alive, I can fight for all my other rights. If the real enemy — the virus — kills me, I have permanently lost my standing to appeal.
Kerry Soelberg, West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: American politics is stuck in a canal, too
By Readers’ Forum
Apr 1, 2021, 10:00am MDT
By Kerry Soelberg
This week, we saw a container ship stuck in the narrow Suez Canal, hindering shipping around the globe. We also have America’s political container ships stuck in the narrow media canal, suspending progress all through our country. I suggest, for starters, one remedy for each of our political parties.
For the Democrats, why not publicly concede that former President Donald Trump carried out a laudable role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines? These vaccines were developed on his watch, with considerable support from his administration, in a time frame never before accomplished. Why not give Trump kudos for this accomplishment and move on to your own critical agenda?
For the Republicans, why not agree on a plan to set the 2020 election in the rear-view mirror? The party of Trump is in charge in Arizona and Georgia, so spend the next six to 12 months evaluating every potentially fraudulent vote and every potentially corruptible voting mechanism in those states, using teams of the best auditors, fraud investigators, information technology gurus, etc. If, in that process, you can find and prosecute the perpetrators of 10,000 or more fraudulent votes in each state, stick to your guns that the election may have been stolen. If not, agree that President Joe Biden may have actually won the election.
Easy peasy. Refloat the Good Ship America.
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: The litmus tests I use to bridge the partisan gap
By Readers’ Forum
Dec 28, 2020, 1:38pm MDT
I am brokenhearted to see the divisions now in America. Never Trumpers in a frenzy. Anti-Bidens likewise. Both sides claim that truth cannot be found, except through them. Anyone who disagrees is both blind and evil. In my effort to bridge these gaps, I use several litmus tests, each restatements of the others.
First, anyone who insists their opponent is lying and that their opponent knows they are lying is probably not truthful to themselves. The proponents on both sides usually believe what they are saying, even when I find it noncredible.
A second litmus test for me: Do I believe that an issue is all right or all wrong, black or white, like a toggle switch? Or do I see the world with shades of gray, as a continuum? My experience teaches me that political issues more often appear on a continuum.
Another helpful restatement: Are my political ideas becoming a second religious faith? Instead of discussing politics, am I bearing my testimony and calling to repentance? I sometimes do that. The neurochemicals eventually subside, but not soon enough.
My fourth litmus test is whether I am seeking news, opinion and truth from contrasting sources. Unless I am investigating sources with which I am uncomfortable, my growth is shallow.
My last litmus test is to compare what I am seeing to a reliable bellwether — a newspaper or trusted institution which has a long-term history of reliability and ability to correct course when wrong.
These litmus tests permit me to see that the fringes are seldom where most truth lies. When I am violating these litmus tests, I am part of the fringe.
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: Mom said it best. Two wrongs don’t make a right
By Readers’ Forum
Nov 27, 2020, 9:30am MDT
By Kerry Soelberg
I was reminded today of my mother’s admonition 65 years ago, when I was 7 years old and rationalized after hitting my sister, “But Mom, she hit me first!” My mom, of course, replied, “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
It was Sen. Mike Lee who brought this to mind when he defended President Donald Trump’s efforts to cancel the outcome of the recent election, sans evidence of widespread fraud. Sen. Lee defended the president by noting that the Democrats struck the first blow by refusing to accept Trump’s legitimate election in 2016 and since.
Sen. Lee was as right as I was 65 years ago when I struck back. Some Democrats and Never Trumpers had it in for President Trump even before he took office. But today, President Trump is just as wrong. I won’t attempt to argue which is more wrong lest my mom rise from the grave and repeat, “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
The Democrats said that the Republicans had it in for Obama for years by fighting his appointments and proposals without advancing their own, and they were right. The Republicans said … and often they were also right.
You get the idea. It’s time for all of us to mature past age 7. One way to do that is for all of us to flee the media silos whose business model would revert us all into 7-year-olds. I often make myself a hypocrite by arguing about my opponent’s hypocrisy. To cultivate grievance is not a solution, nor is it truth. Not at age 7, and not today.
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: Teachers deserve better compensation, and our children deserve a better education
By Readers’ Forum
Feb 20, 2020, 7:00am MDT
Two recent Deseret News articles about education have caught my interest, and hopefully were noticed by our governor and legislators.
The first advocated beginning pay for school teachers at about $60,000 per year under the premise that teachers are the keys to success or failure for our school children, and that current teacher pay is barely sufficient to put a warm body at the head of every class. This article resonated with me, since I have watched my own children thrive with gifted teachers and fail with failing teachers.
The second article was written by a science teacher who described her class sizes as too large for her students to learn effectively. I was strongly impressed by this article, too.
While I support school choice, leveraging tech, parental involvement and every other viable tool to get more bang for our educational buck, I am convinced that we must provide more dollars for our school system. Since our children are the outputs of this system, I am lying to myself if I continue to focus on the number of teacher work days or other elements unrelated to our need to recruit and keep talented teachers in manageable classrooms.
I am not a teacher. I am a taxpayer. As such, I beg our state leaders to fund education to the level of their rhetoric. Please quit believing that the state income tax is generating more money than our education system needs. Our children need far more than you have been providing. Until Utah is no longer at the bottom of the 50 states in education funding and has improved on currently mediocre outcomes, we have no “education governor” and no “education legislature.”
This session, act. The tax revenue for education is there. Rather than cut it, spend it on the kids. If that is not enough, ask for more. We’ll do what it takes to help our kids succeed. Will you?
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: Hate crimes have more than one victim
By Deseret News
Mar 12, 2019, 10:00am MDT
Kerry Soelberg, For the Deseret News
Jan Evans’ letter in the March 7 Deseret News is the latest in a series of letters denigrating the concept of hate crimes legislation.
Evans opens by stating “We cannot legislate behavior,” which is a variation of the statement, “We cannot legislate morality.” The fallacy with both versions of that sentiment is that we have been successfully legislating behavior and indirectly legislating morality since the beginning of time and our society is the better for it.
Abolition of slavery was a legislation of behavior. It largely worked. Then, as Jim Crow laws undermined it, civil rights legislation was enacted to prevent immoral end-runs around it. These new laws have been successful in marvelous degree, with more progress needed. I agree that immorality in the hearts of man continues and creates a proliferation of laws, but over time fewer and fewer hearts agree with the premises of racism as our society has spoken its conscience through its laws.
What Evans did not state was that a hate crime has more than one victim and constitutes multiple crimes. If I were to burn and kill a patch of someone’s lawn for no reason other than I was in the mood, I would be rightly prosecuted for damaging her property. However, if I burn a cross in that person's lawn because she was black, I not only damage her lawn but I terrorize her, her family and all other blacks in the neighborhood. The same crime at the outset, but a second crime has occurred because of my animus toward that person's race.
Hate crime laws, including the one now being diluted and defeated by our Legislature, do not punish immoral thought. They punish the actions which violate the rights of individuals. They are needed to define the nature of the victimization being perpetrated and hence the nature of the crime.
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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Deseret News
Letter: Remember the Utah Compact?
By Deseret News
Jun 15, 2018, 8:40am MDT
Kerry Soelberg, For the Deseret News
Why do we seldom today hear about the Utah Compact as we are swept away in the avalanche of immigration issues? Build a bigger wall, break up families, stop the flow of drugs, the DACA kids, the caravans of refugees at the border, the 11 million illegal immigrants who keep our economy afloat but are accused of usurping our social services.
Some groups focus on the constitutional mandate of self-protection and the rule of law; others focus on the families and the humanity that create a modern parable of the good Samaritan. C’mon folks. We have a balanced guide in the form of the Utah Compact which reconciles the extremes of the immigration issue. Am I affiliated with any organized religion in America today? If so, my faith leaders have probably endorsed the Utah Compact, yet the religiously pious at both ends of the political spectrum deny the beautiful balance in the Utah Compact that our faith leaders have endorsed.
Why not look at it again? My own Republican Party platform ignores and abhors it. The Democratic Party equally but oppositely denies it. So Google it and ask if your faith leaders might have a valid opinion in their endorsement of the Utah Compact. When it was first issued, I hoped it might become the national template for discussion of immigration issues. Sadly, our own Utah politicians have either forgotten it or run from it. The light on the hill does not help the neighbors unless its owner keeps it burning.
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan
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THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Letter: The primary threats to our free country
Jan. 5, 2021, 6:06 a.m.
What are the primary external threats to our free country?
1. China
2. Russia
3. Iran
4. North Korea
Perhaps in that order.
What are the primary internal threats to our free country?
1. The loss of the intact family
2. Systemic racism
3. The wealth gap
4. The pandemic
5. Information silos
6. President Trump and his base
Not necessarily in that order.
Kerry Soelberg, West Jordan
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Deseret News
Opinion: Infrastructure bill was Trump’s idea
By Readers’ Forum
Nov 20, 2021, 2:48pm MDT
I am perplexed. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on the need to improve our national infrastructure, and he promised a “really huge” investment to repair and upgrade the deteriorating highways, bridges, power systems, etc. that are critical to our national economy. The voters who elected him seemed to agree. Once elected, President Trump was distracted by tax cutting, the Mueller report and other issues, so he never sent a proposal to Congress to carry out his campaign pledge. Surely, he would have promoted this issue in a second term.
So here we are in 2021, with President Joe Biden proposing and passing a less huge, more modest infrastructure bill, and Trump and his supporters fighting it tooth and claw, calling it socialistic and communistic. Biden’s bill does have a minor piece of investment for charging stations to aid the transition to cleaner energy, but most of the bill is precisely what Trump campaigned for in 2016. Moreover, if conservatives had pledged more support for the core concept, the charging stations may have been negotiable this year. But the core was anathema for my fellow Republicans now in 2021.
Why the change? I hope and trust that our leaders and mainstream voters are Americans first and party members second. Is my trust misplaced?
Kerry Soelberg
West Jordan