I wrote a letter to the editor at the Inquirer but it appears it will not be accepted so I decided to make a blog entry about it. I was responding to an op-ed article written by Christine Flowers. Some of you locally may recognize her as a frequent contributor to the Inquirer and she also appears on local Sunday morning talk shows. I find it painful to read her opinions as they are reliably written from a right wing wing nut position. She likes to stress that she works as a lawyer for immigration cases but she invariably supports our unpresident from A to Z.
My point in this entry is about the Proud Boys flap that arose in Haverford with one of their fire companies. The commissioners there demanded that a local fireman resign because he had attended Proud Boys meetings and may have gone through an initiation for the group. One of the things that I never saw in various articles about this flap was taking a deeper look at the presence of Proud Boys in our area, and I wanted my letter to stimulate some conversation about this presence.
Here is the letter that I wrote and I even included a snappy title for the Inquirer to use, but alas, they chose to ignore me. I write letters often and am rejected often – perhaps I am too direct for their taste?
The letter:
Haverford, we have a problem!
Christine Flowers’ editorial commentary is not surprising. Comparing Haverford’s actions to Orwellian thought control ignores the history of the Proud Boys (Charlottesville, for example) and stating that the Southern Poverty Law Center is questionable in Flowers’ opinion in labeling hate groups because they designate some prolife groups as such is equally ludicrous. Perhaps she forgets the prolife groups that advocate the killing of doctors or the groups that force women to run gauntlets of verbal abuse when they go to a clinic. Did you ever notice that the faces of the fine people in those gauntlets closely resemble the faces of the white folks who hurled verbal abuse on black students in places like Little Rock, Arkansas?
I really applaud the Haverford action of demanding the resignation of Bruce McClay. I too do not know him, but I know this – he attended multiple meetings and may have gone through a Proud Boys initiation. What I have not seen mentioned in my readings is this – who initiated him? Who did he meet with? Where did they meet? I doubt that he traveled to Oregon for those activities. That means that he is just a symptom of a larger problem – that there may be other Proud Boys living in plain sight around Haverford. Demanding his resignation is a good first step that lets people know that Haverford will not tolerate this group.
Now let’s uncover the others.