Several who oppose the same-sex-marriage amendment on which we will vote in November 2012 complain to me that the Herald should publish their opinions. I agree and do now what they simply failed to do. I urged them to write letters to the editor so we could all read their ideas and see with what language and emotions they express them, but none has. I will quote them, letting them speak for themselves and letting readers reach their own conclusions about the validity and strength of their case.

Although Tony Wichowski from Sacramento acknowledges I write respectfully and politely about homosexuals, he just knows what I am hiding. “Although you were careful not to expose your obvious REAL reason … I was able to discern your ‘truth’ … by reading between the lines …” This is to say, he knows what I think by reading what I did not write. He knows, for instance that I believe “God hates fags.” While off there in California he knows that I listen “faithfully to Fox News,” am “taking orders from the Mormon prophet who claims to speak as if he were God,” and “worship a hateful, vengeful, petty little myth.” Isn’t it amazing how much he knows by reading between the lines and that of one column out of hundreds?

Tony Fusco: “… one day all the pathetic, ignorant, narrow-minded, hate-mongering individuals such as yourself will have died off…. as the backwards, knuckle dragging idiots that you are.”

Tom Rodman: “You’re a [starts with F] bigot! You’re an old fart and the sooner you pass on … bigotry like yours … Your opinion is all based on your dogma and bigotry. … It’s time for the country to move on without you. You’re old. You’re bigoted. And you’re stubborn. … Get over your bigotry.”

Other gems of reason and civility can be found on the Herald’s website that invites anyone (Herald readers or not) to post anonymously (no need to stand by your words) about what it publishes.

One (no name to credit): “I love when [you] homophones” talk about “stupid thing.” “Your [sic] nothing but a Shepard to the sheople of america [sic].” (Urban Dictionary: “a hybrid of people and sheep. Sheople are idiots that do dumb stuff because everyone else is doing it.”

Another: What I write is “bloated self assertions of correctness.”

“Black people are not as good as white.” (I made no reference to Blacks, but this doesn’t matter.)

One in Houston thinks mine is: “What a laughable opinion piece.” Well at least he didn’t swear and ridicule, and he spoke to what I wrote rather than my person.

I am, charges another, “a Dinosaur out of touch with the world today. I feel pity for his narrow minded views…” Says another because “you have lived threw [sic] these events … trying to rehash the same tired and false arguments that only play to the sheep.” (Dear Reader, he’s talking about you.)

He talks about me again: “Religious intolerance … a prime example of Christianity’s Religious Intolerance. You have a belief that your Christian way is the only way and all else is sin.” I “like to remind us of his Phd [sic] in Godliness” but it is “religious bigotry” and I am “just a wretchedly sad old man hanging on to some cultlike Christian ideas.”

People like me “publicly announce their intolerance. This is either blind naivete [sic], arrogance, or a profound rationalized justification that their principles give them the right to denounce others’ rights.”

Two people had the decency to write letters to the editor, and I appreciate these. However, one betrays himself as not being forthright in reacting to the column. He puts in quotes a phrase that is nowhere in the column. I did write this, but it was in an e-mail reply to a reporter for a GLBT publication. Evidently, that reporter handed this over to another person and asked him to write to the editor. So, he was not responding to the column, as he claimed, but to what another person told him the column says. It might be he has never even seen the column. (In all this, of course, the editor was an innocent victim.)

(“[Sic]” is the standard editorial insertion to indicate I did not make the language error, but that I have quoted exactly. Careless language expresses careless thinking.)

Now that you have read these, who is it that is a hateful bigot? What does this indicate about the strength and quality of their arguments?