While I recognize and respect that the Cape Gazette wishes to represent many viewpoints in its commentaries - and to open readers' minds to those viewpoints - there is a fine line between the support of freedom of speech and providing a platform for venal views that misrepresent American history and culture.
Such a platform for distorted speech supports a present-day culture that endangers American democracy, individual people and groups, and those very individual freedoms it purports to protect by providing a platform for such viewpoints.
Geary Foertsch cites Sam Huntington's book "Who Are We?" in April 11's commentary against sanctuary states and municipalities by quoting Huntington's description of our cultural "origins." The quote he selects describes America's "core culture" as essentially Christian, protestant in values, and based in European art and philosophy among other characteristics.
If we agree to the premise that the United States of America's "core culture" stems from her beginnings, then that "core culture" also includes genocide of Native Americans and African slavery - activities that are scarcely Christian.
We cannot appropriate history in service of our personal preferences. Indeed, our founding fathers seemed to have profoundly understood this by enshrining rights and freedoms in our origins as a people that promote cultural and spiritual evolution as opposed to static expression of our difficult natures.
Throughout our history, there has always been a fine line between freedom of speech and individual safety to pursue life, liberty and happiness. That fine line has always been litigated by courts and editors with a strong leaning toward freedom of speech.
And while I value that leaning as the greatness of American democracy and dialogue, such freedoms do not mean that dangerous speech should go unanswered - in this case, at a minimum, by the readers of the Cape Gazette.
Yes, what became the United States of America may have "begun" with a group of Europeans, but that "core culture" began evolving the minute they stepped foot on land and interacted among themselves and with that land and its people. It has evolved ever since.
Needless to say, our founding documents support that evolution as essential to this country's protection of individual safety and rights - and, to this reader's mind - that human and cultural evolution is the clarion call of our "core" and the voice that must be heard as fundamental.
Joyce Bader
Rehoboth Beach
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