Douglas Wood, Sartell
My wife Kathy and I enjoy keeping up with the local news through the Newsleader and are grateful our community has a quality news outlet to fill this need. However, we feel the paper’s recent decision to publish a racist, offensive screed by Ron Scarbro was appalling.
In his rant, Scarbro openly and deliberately compared certain groups of human beings to “pests and vermin,” identified them as a distinct and different “species” who will bring “diseases and destruction” to our homes and who will “reproduce, thereby creating millions more of their kind.” He adds, charitably, if his prescriptions are followed, “We won’t even have to kill them.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It could have been taken almost word for word from any Nazi pamphlet in 1930s Germany.
Scarbro’s tone, word choices, analogies, diagnosis and solutions are all explicitly chosen to de-humanize groups of human beings. While he may have a right in this country to publish such reprehensible sentiments, the Newsleader is under no legal or ethical obligation to print them. In fact, in doing so, the paper harms – not helps – the content and quality of public discourse in our community. This is particularly important in light of the fact Scarbro lives not here but in Georgia. Let him peddle his wares there. We hope and expect we will see no more of his enlightened views in the Newsleader.