INTRODUCTION
1984-2012 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
When
I moved to Hagerstown in 1984 and established a life of my own, I
accelerated the discovery of new things about myself. I knew since
early adulthood I was a
liberal and an atheist, but I didn't know until August of that year
that I was a Humanist. I learned that from reading a tract, one of
several I was given when I introduced myself to the Unitarian
Universalist (UU) Church in Hagerstown.
I wanted the truths I
knew to be disseminated, or at least not suppressed, and I thought a
letter to the editor of the Hagerstown Herald-Mail was a good place to
begin. The subjects that turned out to be most compelling were
abortion, separation of religion and government, and simply educating
people about the desirability of a secular life and about the
distortions in a religious life view.
The abortion issue was
being fought in the letters and other editorial spaces, which I read
about in the Hagerstown newspaper while still at my home in southern
Pennsylvania. The religious fundamentalists in the area were always
beating the drums for local and national public life to be under their
control and resting on the foundations of their spiritual beliefs.
Worldly history and secular philosophy were but obstacles to
reaching their
ends. In November 1984 one of their local leaders who ran a private
Christian academy, George Michael, wrote a long
editorial
that assumed as fact many misconceptions, both political and
philosophical. Chief among his misconceptions was that the "Founding
Fathers called on God," and that is what the the editor had
titled it.
I don't
remember if that was the exact article that prompted my first letter. I
do remember that article striking me as fundamentally and deeply wrong
in all its assumptions, so much so that I began to form a reply vaguely
titled "religion is not the only point of view." That reply required
understanding my own philosophy and its constituients -- epistemology
and
ethics especially, and something about human behavior. I needed
to systemize
beliefs. I began to write, and I gave part of the resulting paper as two talks
at the Winter Philosophy Series that I organized at the Unitarian Universalist Church of
Hagerstown. The bulk of it is still unpublished.
If the
fantasy by George Michael started my letter-writing, then my editorial career can
be said to have reached a natural end when in 1998, a few months before
I left Hagerstown for Alabama, a long piece of mine attempting to shame
those fundamentalist Christians was published as a stand-alone
editorial in the same
space where Mr. Michael's letter appeared 14 years before. That final editorial is
included here. The motivational editorial will be included when I
publish the philosophy. For now I can suply it on request.
Some of my letters are missing. I don't
see the first one or the second one I published that qualified me, in
the eyes of
one woman of the Christian right, as a "threat to Western
Civilization."