In the late 1980s, at the beginning of my short-lived career in journalism, I was given access to the archives of The Newfoundland Herald in St. John's. It was a tiny attic room in the building on Logy Bay Road, and it had in it copies of individual numbers going back many years. I could waste hours reading: one of the reasons journalism never worked out for me. Anyway, I remember vividly the letters to the editor published in the 1970s when concerned citizens objected, for example, to the airing of Three's Company because it dared show a man rooming with two women! I suspect that many of those letter writers never lived to sample the entertainment fare of today, but the tone of their moralizing epistles lives on in community newspapers across the country.
It lives on in my local paper, The Lethbridge Herald.
On any given morning, you can read citizens discussing our city's abysmal snow-clearing policy, explaining how our local government has invested poorly, or using column inches to thank their neighbors for helping when their cars break down. This a valuable use of a public forum. But you must also subject yourself to people from Lethbridge and the surrounding area who set out their barely-considered observations on abortion, evolution, homosexuality, and birth control. A month's worth of newsprint will tell you everything you need to know about using biblical quotations out of context to reinforce personal moral judgments.
I am content to meet my maker having followed the command of the atheist George Carlin: "Keep thy religion to thyself!"
For those of us who have taken nuanced and thoughtful positions on difficult contemporary issues, it is valuable to consider the opinions of our friends and neighbors. I find, however, that a conversation over a cup of coffee or simply observing the quiet examples of those people around me to be far more constructive than allowing myself to be subjected to a sermon over toast each morning. So why do our papers do this? Well, if they are reflecting their reading public, I would say that this is a public that does not deserve to be there reflected. Let those citizens pony up the seventy-five cents a day necessary to start their own blogs. You could blog for what these cranks spend on postage, alone.
I know what you are thinking: public debate is a valuable thing. I would agree that considered public debate is very valuable. But how do you have a meaningful discussion with the truly closed-minded? A few years ago, a historian friend of mine gave a public paper in Lethbridge on comparative murder statistics. His argument was that our crime rates are actually in decline, and they do not compare to American crime rates; therefore, any modeling of our policing on approaches taken in the United States is wrong-headed. What did my friend get for his trouble? A letter to the editor arguing that any count of Canadian murders is incomplete if it does not include abortion statistics. Now, surely, no matter what stand you take on abortion, you would agree that such information will provide no value in determining how many cops we need to combat gang wars raging in Vancouver and Calgary. How did giving this correspondent an airing further public debate?
Certain evangelical Christians maintain that they have a duty to bring forth the good news. I respect that. My paternal grandparents spent a combined ninety-two years as evangelical clergy, and they delivered their share of open air sermons, blared forth into gravel parking lots throughout rural Newfoundland. But I recall that these were people with compassion and understanding, too: they would provide wedding ceremonies for divorced couples turned away from their own churches. My grandfather once told a story about a young man who took on a pentecostal fit during testimony one evening. He flopped around on the church floor shrieking. "What are you doing?" my grandfather asked. "I am just worshiping the Lord," the young man sobbed. "Well, get on your feet," my grandfather countered. "You can worship him better from there."
Even for those people who have to impose their religious views on others, there is an appropriate time and there is an appropriate place. The daily letters column of a local newspaper is neither.
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