Dear HCN,
I was disappointed to see
Ken Toole’s essay, “How the far right spreads its “wacky” ideas’
(HCN, 12/8/97). In publishing this article, you clarified for one
and all that your agenda is a political and lifestyle one, not
environmental. You have just alienated the conservative fringe of
your readership at a time when you should be inviting them
in.
I am a University of California and Cal State
alumni, an environmental professional, and I now live in northern
Wyoming. I also hunt and am a gun owner. As a student of the U.S.
Constitution and the historical context that created our nation, I
am also opposed to gun control. I would guess that I am also
politically more conservative than your staff. So, are we here to
find out what common interests we have in protecting our wild
places, or are we here to make generalizations about anyone who
“doesn’t think and do exactly as we do’? Does Mr. Toole and your
editorial staff assume from my politics that I am, for example,
anti-Semitic or anti-black?
I am not a “radical
right-winger,” a militia type, nor am I looking over my shoulder
for black helicopters. But I’ll bet some of your readers are. What
are you going to tell them when they cancel their subscriptions?
That your publication’s stated goals for our nation’s
environmental, wildlife and public lands are only for the
“politically correct’?
Bo
Bowman
Banner,
Wyoming
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Ken Toole speaks for the politically correct.
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