Leonard Pitts Revisited--

from June 24th, as you may recall, was a report on Mr. Pitts painting Republicans with a very broad brush of bigotry to which I responded with a letter to the local paper. At the time I did not tell you that the publisher had sent me a short email indicating that Mr. Pitts has the freedom of speech. The other side of the coin is that I received two calls from complete strangers who were in agreement with my position.

Well, yesterday there was a response to the original letter from an acquaintance of mine. We both belong to the NAACP and have worked on a couple of projects together. But she wrote in defense of Mr. Pitts. You could have knocked me over with a feather! She noted that she really enjoyed reading the opinions of Mr. Pitts. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was that she actually holds such a low opinion of me--my husband sometimes teases me about leading a sheltered life--well, I'd never been called a bigot in public before so he won't say that again.

Anyway, this lady had a bout with cancer and she was in my prayers at the time and I trust she is healthy now. And, incidentally she is Caucasian. She is a staunch Democrat so maybe that has something to do with her opinion because we are both pretty open about our politics. She accused me of vilifying Mr. Pitts. Frankly, I think he did it to himself.

BUT THAT IS NOT REALLY THE POINT...
Both the publisher and Carol did not pick up on my message--perhaps I wasn't clear. The point is that Mr. Pitts is PAID for his words and he is more than an unknown writer=--he is an opinion maker and by publishing his messages and paying for them the paper is certainly by extension approving of what he says. This puts, in my mind, an extra burden on the paper.

To paraphrase Edmund Burke "evil survives when good men do nothing." I'm still hoping the paper does a survey and if more people agree that they want to keep his column in the paper I'll just have to learn to read it or another daily on line.

Anyway, thought you'd be interested in what's going on in little old Jackson.

God bless........