Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Letter: America still remains a Christian nation

Gag me, yet another Xtian supremacist waving his persecution hankie. It's a waste of the reader's time, of course, but in the comments I notice George Seaman, a normally reliable defender of free speech, begging the editors to stop printing such letters. What I'm not sure George is noticing is that most of the responses seem to be calling the writer on his historical lies and logical tangles. This is how it's supposed to work -- you can say what you want, but you get to be accountable for it.

PS to the awful headline writer: "still remains" is irredeemably redundant.

3 comments:

Birther T. Bagur said...

while in a perfect world I would decry Seaman's call for the Courier to stop printing such letters, I sorta agree with him here for one simple reason: The Courier already censors their letter page. I have written about ten letters for print and have never gotten so much as a callback.
I think there is good evidence that they only run the worst and most embarrassing letters written from a liberal perspective. It is also the reason they run a recurring op/ed from that moonbat instructor from Prescott College. If they aren't going to run every letter they receive, then calls for better community representation among the letters they do run is perfectly legit.

Steven Ayres said...

BTB: That's a good point. The limited page space at least sometimes forces choices about which letters to print, leaving some behind, and snail-mail letters carry more overhead in requiring that someone type them up. (I think it'd be easy for the Courier to carry every electronically submitter LTE on the Website, since it has no space limitations, but we can probably be confident that ain't gonna happen.)

I long ago stopped submitting LTEs because they were being so badly mangled (see my only post to this blog in '08, for example), so I have no good sense of current policy at the paper. I'd like to know more.

I'll be happy to publish unaccepted Courier LTEs here, as well as comparisons of original LTEs and the Courier edits. Its capricious and often politically motivated screwing around with letters is particularly irritating to me.

WaitWut? said...

Excellent points, both of you. I think I might like it here. I've just spent the last half hour reading posts, comments, opinions, etc. and I don't feel like slamming my head into my monitor.