Commentary

The Baltimore Sun is pleased to announce the 2023 class of inductees into our Business and Civic Hall of Fame, chosen for their leadership and community endeavors. We will honor these 14 accomplished women and men and at an awards banquet to be held at The Center Club in Baltimore on June 8 and in a special section to be published shortly thereafter.

Voters in November demanded lawmakers rethink the Free State’s cannabis policies. Lawmakers should also re-evaluate Maryland’s antiquated and discriminatory cannabis drug testing policies. With adult-use legalization around the corner, this is the ideal time for legislators to overhaul these unnecessarily punitive policies that sanction employees who consume cannabis while away from their jobs.

Here in Maryland, you might have noticed our beautiful trees and flowers blooming early this winter. In fact, the region’s National Cherry Blossom Festival has been moved up to accommodate these early blooms. While the colorful flowers certainly brighten and beautify our communities, they also signify a darker reality. This unseasonably warm winter is just the latest development in a string of hot temperatures and extreme weather in the Chesapeake region — impacting all industries relying on our lands and waters. Some farmers, for instance, are acknowledging the challenge and stepping up to support solutions.

I concur with the March 21 editorial “A better way to vote” that some of the Republican opposition to ranked-choice voting is an admission that they believe GOP candidates “are less broadly acceptable to voters.” When prominent Republicans, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), claim that Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system is “a scam to rig elections” against GOP candidates, they are alleging, incorrectly, that these candidates can’t compete in a wide-open contest in which centrist, independent-minded voters can participate.

For parents, decisions about our kids’ education are among the most discussed and debated in families, among friends, and in the public discourse. Public or private. Neighborhood or magnet. Move to the suburbs or try the new charter. Now imagine that you are the parent of a child with a disability, like me and many of my closest friends whose families include someone with Down syndrome.

Baltimore’s Board of Ethics has been entrusted with the important mission of guarding “against improper influence or even the appearance of improper influence, and to ensure public trust” in city government. It’s not complicated. They are the watchdogs. They are the folks who, to use a common expression in our line of work, “follow the money” to make sure Elected Official A isn’t taking envelopes stuffed with cash from Contractor B — or any of the multitude of other potential forms of public corruption.

The Maryland Attorney General investigation into the Archdiocese of Baltimore resulted in a 456-page report that has yet to be publicly released but, we’ve been told, implicates 158 Catholic priests and lay people in the direct abuse and sexual torture of at least 600 victims. It’s also said to chronicle how Church leaders knew about, and in many cases enabled or transferred the sexual predators, allowing them to continue the abuse. These horrid acts are difficult for Catholics like myself to come to grips with because they cut so deep into our faith and trust in the sanctity of the Church.