Letters

I apologize in advance if this letter isn’t as polished as I would prefer, but I was stunned by the bias I found in the editorial on banned books [“Read Banned Books,” Editorial, October 5], and next to it a pathetic half page of anti-Trump, anti-conservative bile by a formerly respected author [“The Party’s Over,” Out of Left Field, October 5].

The knee-jerk reaction to the rejection of sexually inappropriate material by the State of Florida and now many others is being distorted and propagandized. In this very paper, the title “Read Banned Books” sets a false premise that your access as an adult to controversial reading material is under threat by renegade librarians of all people.

The restriction instituted at the insistence of parents of people younger than teenagers was no challenge to intellectual freedom. It was a necessary response to an education policy that was far out of line with community and state citizenry. The false premise that now all of America’s libraries and librarians are being brow beat to remove thought provoking materials is nonsense. No Conservative or Republican views free speech this way. Frankly the left has far more dirty hands in the suppression of information.

I must say that I never would have had an interest in participating if there wasn’t the provocation of unanswered columnists trashing Republicans and Conservatives as the hallowed guests of The Press. Phil Keith, a former columnist who claimed he was “Mostly Right,” was just the opposite, and I would tell him so on these pages. I have found Anthony Brandt equally inaccurate and annoying in the privilege he enjoys in occupying a half-page to entertain us with his nonsense.

For the record , I too came from modest Republican beginnings, became liberal when exposed to the indoctrination of a college education in the 1960s , and found my true conservative moral compass with the candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Yes, there have been good and bad Republican presidents, but they generally respected our Constitution. Democrats, on the other hand, have distorted the basic tenets of limited government and grown its size and influence without any concern for the damage it does to individual freedom. Each term of Democratic control has pushed the envelopes of a civil society, basic personal and gender identity, racial harmony, and our national identity further and further from those very Republican roots, Mr. Brandt recalls. Ask yourself if what you see coming from your news source makes you proud of the America we have become, and don’t think Democrats don’t own their share of it.

Ed Surgan

Westhampton