The Editorial that was too Hot to Print

My local paper was too wimpy to publish this. It’s the second installment in my personal fight to be heard by my congressional representatives.

An Open Letter

A few weeks ago, I filled out a form on the ACLU website
expressing my opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment
banning gay marriages and sent it to both Kansas Senators and my
House Representative. I included an e-mail address if their
offices wished to reply. Todd Tiahrt and Sam Brownback, as
expected, didn’t send anything back. But to my surprise, I found
an e-mail from Pat Roberts in my inbox soon after.

What it said, however, both shocked and dismayed me. It was a
form e-mail that began this way: “Thank you for contacting me is
[sic] support of amending the Constitution to prevent same sex
marriages.” It then went on to provide more pro-amendment
propaganda.

Not only was it poorly edited, Roberts’ message completely
ignored my point of view! It was like sending a letter to Wal-
Mart complaining about the way it drives small-town businesses
under and getting back a sales brochure.

Disappointed, I hit “reply” and fired back an e-mail trying to
explain that, no, he’d gotten it all wrong, that I was against
the amendment, not for it. And I added a few things in there
about how he should probably get his staffers to edit their
official form letters better before they get sent out. I was
flabbergasted, however, when the message bounced off his server
and came back to me as “undeliverable.”

No wonder people feel distanced from their government.

But there’s something far more disturbing afoot here. Not only
was my point of view ignored by Roberts’ office, my ability to
express how upset I was by that was electronically denied. The
real message was clear: there’s only one perspective here, and
that belongs to Pat Roberts.

Sadly, this sort of behavior has become typical in American
politics. When President Bush declares Prisoners of War “enemy
combatants” he ignores the Geneva Conventions. When the
administration calls attacks on American troops in Iraq a “sign
of our success,” he ignores basic realities.

George Orwell had a word for all this: Newspeak. It was the
language the totalitarian government of his novel 1984 used “not
to extend but to diminish the range of thought.”

Representative democracy thrives when there is an open
marketplace of ideas, when even threatening notions can be freely
expressed, debated, mulled over. When ideas are denied by those
representatives, even ideas they disagree with, democracy dies.

–Lael Ewy