Brozak Provides Vision On Needs Of Military
EDITORIAL ENDORSEMENT, The Home News Tribune, October 27, 2004
Voters in the 7th Congressional District have an opportunity to send a new member to the House of Representatives -- one whose insight into overseas military operations could serve the country well for the foreseeable future.
The candidate is Steve Brozak, a Democrat who is challenging GOP incumbent Mike Ferguson.
Brozak, a businessman who served in the Marines and the Marine Reserves, has been on the ground in Asia, Haiti, Bosnia and Iraq.
Besides the general frame of reference this experience has given him, Brozak has seen firsthand the needs of troops in a war zone in terms of preparation and equipment.
He is also keenly aware of the impact on families and businesses when reservists and National Guard members are plucked outfox their everyday lives and shipped out for indefinite periods.
And he is the sensitive to the burden recent events have placed -- and will continue to place
-- on an all-volunteer military force.
While Ferguson offers as reassurance that the Army is meeting or exceeding its retention and recruiting goals, Brozak points out the strain on homeland security caused by the fact that so many men and women who have been activated are also first-responders to emergencies in their home towns.
Brozak also has a healthy skepticism about the level of security at New Jersey ports more than three years after the terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., pointing out that the 100 percent screening of incoming cargo containers
-- which Ferguson has cited -- consists largely of checking paper manifests, and that outgoing containers are not checked at all.
Ferguson favors and Brozak opposes a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of only a man and a woman -- in other words, prohibiting in the organic law of the land the marriage of same-sex couples.
This is a contentious issue that has emotional and religious facets and that has profound implications for civil liberties.
The subject is being sorted out in the municipal buildings, state legislatures and courts of the various states -- the states which traditionally have regulated marriage in their own way.
That's where the debate belongs. A constitutional amendment would be at least premature, but inadvisable at any point.
As Brozak has pointed out, the constitutional amendments that have endured have always broadened, not limited, civil rights.
A willingness to tinker with the Constitution for any but the most grave reasons is troubling.
While both candidates are hopeful about the benefits of stem-cell research in the long term, Ferguson has expressed ethical misgivings about research on embryonic rather than adult cells.
Embryonic cells are obtained from embryos -- less than a week old -- produced by in-vitro fertilization, but not implanted.
They differ from adult cells in that they are not specialized and can proliferate indefinitely in a culture and have the ability to develop into one of the specific cells produced in the human body
-- such as the cells of a diseased liver, pancreas, bone, or even blood.
Ferguson says he has discussed this with specialists in this field and he has been told that adult-cell research is more promising.
To put it mildly, there is no unanimity on that point among scientists, and it is too early in the evolution of this type of research to preclude the complete exploration of its potential that Brozak endorses.
Ferguson, a former teacher, has demonstrated a certain amount of independence as a Republican congressman, breaking with the administration on some important issues -- for instance, by sponsoring a ban on assault weapons, opposing the decision to let old power plants expand without new federal clean-air standards, and voting against oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Overall, however, his record doesn't outweigh the advantages the district can gain by sending Steve Brozak to Congress.
(Published in the HNT on 10-27-04)
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