Published Sunday, March 11, 2007
Your opinion, please
ANN COULTER was a featured speaker early this month at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. After her prepared remarks, Coulter was asked to discuss presidential hopeful former Sen. John Edwards.
"It turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse - I can't really talk about Edwards," said Coulter.
It was an idiotic, sophomoric statement. Besides that it didn't even approach making any sense. It was Ann Coulter doing what she does so well - tossing a verbal bomb. Of course, it wasn't the first time Coulter has tossed a bomb, and it certainly was not the first time she has been idiotic.
BUT THIS TIME a lot of people have decided, enough is enough. As of late Friday, at least seven newspapers across the country had fired Coulter from their pages. A newspaper in North Carolina, The Sanford Herald, reported that it had received about 1,000 anti-Coulter e-mails in recent days. The paper, which has decided to drop Coulter's column, was one many listed on the MediaMatters.org Web site as carrying her column.
MediaMatters missed us, thank goodness, so we have not been deluged with anti-Coulter e-mails from across the country. Quite frankly, we are not all that concerned what people in Boise, Idaho, think about us carrying Ann Coulter's column. However, we are concerned with what our real readers think. And we are beginning to hear from some of them.
"I hope the SJ-R does the right thing by dropping Ann Coulter from your paper. Frankly, I don't think anyone who calls all liberals in general 'godless traitors' should have been given space in any respectable paper to begin with. She cheapens the quality of political debate and poisons the waters of American politics," wrote Will Reynolds, who labeled Coulter in his blog ("Where there's a Will, there's a way) as "The Shame of the SJ-R."
A nice woman called late Friday afternoon to make the same suggestion. "I think this recent comment has simply gone too far," she said, though she did not threaten to drop her subscription if we continued to carry Coulter. That was a nice touch - usually the call or e-mail begins with that threat. We did have one promising variation on that - one fellow last week promised that he would actually sign up for a yearlong subscription if we dropped Coulter.
THE PROBLEM with giving in to threats is that they never stop coming. We could pretty quickly be reduced to running the school lunch menu if we decided it was our job to never offend anyone again. That's not our job. Likewise, it is not our goal to provoke people with incendiary columns. We would not have run Coulter if we did not believe she held value for at least some of our readers.
We are also hearing from some that we have become too conservative. "I would like to see more balance on the SJ-R editorial page. They print a group of far-right conservatives like Coulter, Maulkin and Novak ..." wrote Reynolds.
That's kind of funny, since we often take calls from those concerned we are leaning too far left. And when Molly Ivins was still alive, we got plenty of calls and e-mails suggesting we dump her too. Some called her hate-filled and irresponsible - adjectives also used to describe Coulter.
It's a precarious position. We truly try to have an open and diverse editorial page - the volume of reader letters should attest to that. We are extremely uncomfortable with censorship. We are also interested in what our readers think about keeping Ann Coulter as a columnist.
WE WANT to hear from you - pro and con. Tell us why we should either keep or dump Coulter. You can e-mail