No interference
I agree with Mayor Mary Clark's contention that residents of the town of James Island should be allowed to govern themselves without unwelcome interference by its larger neighbor ("It's time city of Charleston, courts allow James Islanders self-determination," April 18).
Twice the people of James Island have gone to the ballot and voted in favor of organizing unincorporated areas of their island into a town.
In voting thus, they were not asking for special favor but rather the right to do what other residents throughout the state take for granted: to govern themselves at the local level.
James Islanders' efforts to exercise local control over their own lives have been met with stiff opposition because such control conflicts with the expansionary designs of the island's powerful neighbor.
Indeed, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is pressing hard to continue that city's aggressive colonization and development of James Island, which runs counter to the expressed will of the vast majority of the island's residents.
As Mayor Clark rightly points out, this imposition violates James Islanders' natural right to self-determination. This right that all people have to self-determination was eloquently articulated by the British political philosopher John Locke, whose ideas about freedom, governance and human rights profoundly influenced Thomas Jefferson in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and later influenced the framers of the Constitution. Locke, of course, was author of the first Constitution of the Carolinas.
The founders of our nation claimed the right to self-determination as moral justification for their struggle to be free of foreign rule. Forced rule by tyrannical outsiders was deemed wrong in 1776 and it is still wrong today!
ROBERT WESTERFELHAUS
823 Fort Johnson Road
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