“Race, color, male or female, is not a choice but natural origin, and on the other hand, sexual orientation or preference is a personal choice.”
That’s what the latest Letter To The Editor, “Don’t compare gay marriage to civil rights,” in part, states.
Its author, Bill Thompson, continues with,
“There is nothing illegal concerning gays in civil unions having the same benefits as married people but the marriage estate itself is a sacred institution created by God and should forever remain that way.”
Need I say more?
(By the way, Mr. Thompson’s “thoughts” are easily debunked, here.)
These are not the intelligent musings of the local citizenry, applied to current legal or social issues. These are the religious rantings of a reader. And religious rantings have no place in a local newspaper.
It’s time to hold the feet of the Editors of MyCentralJersey.com to the fire.
It’s time to say, enough is enough.
It’s time to hold them accountable and demand they act as a responsible publishing entity, or stop visiting their site and stop buying their papers.
This is not a freedom of speech issue. This is an issue of responsible journalism. Something that seems to have escaped the grasp of these editors.
It’s time they remembered the titles on their desks, and their responsibility to their community, and to journalism itself.
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While I agree with you in spirit, I am not convinced that newspapers have an editorial responsibility to fact-check letters to the editor. Since the offensive letters are not generated by the paper's staff, they are not expected to conform to journalistic standards.
I found an interesting discussion on this here: http://community.feministing.com/2009/04/inaccura… — in which content that was potentially harmful was presented without any sort of editor's note about its factual errors.
If I were to (for instance) write a screeching paranoid rant about how we're all being poisoned by jet trails, and if I gave my correct name and residence, my newspaper would not be duty bound to point out I was out of my mind, since it's in the opinion section and clearly noted as such. It's why you can find so many nutjobs in the opinion section — crazy is to letters to the editor as white is to rice.
Again, let me stress that I totally agree with you, and I wish with all my heart that newspapers would make an effort not to present harmful opinion without some sort of disclaimer, it's just not how the letters to the editor section is supposed to work — news organizations are actually supposed to go out of their way to give their readers (no matter how crazy or misguided) a voice. If editors were to selectively suppress public opinion, they would be open to accusations of censorship.
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