LETTER: Columnist has sinister slant
To the editor:
The central function of free speech in a campus newspaper is polite reverence. As the wonderful and dignified Reverend Cotton Mather once said, while performing exorcisms on demonic students he found in the backwoods of Massachusetts, “A Good School deserveth to be call’d, the very Salt of the Town.”
Christopher Atkinson and Callista Cox share that sentiment, as I do, because they bravely wrote against Liz Emery’s offensive article about the lowering LDS missionary age. Atkinson points out its malicious intent and unprofessional attitude, how its nature dissolves the Statesman’s standards of publication. Cox implies that many non-Mormon foreigners, like Italians and Irishmen, are drunks. Emery is also not a Mormon.
It’s much worse. Emery is not just “stirring the pot.” What she stirs is, in fact, a crucible. Liz Emery, with her history of blasphemous articles and powers of evil, must be a witch.
Her mind-warping rhetoric is clearly the influence of Satan, who seeks to undermine the Constitution, beginning with the USU Statesman. As Atkinson and Cox show us, though Emery argues using facts and statistics, she does not have any evidence. It’s amazing that anyone can do that – almost eery. It must be some kind of sinister, silver-tongued spell.
As anti-religious-freedom humanist Thomas Jefferson said, “The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.” He was wisely referring only to those thoughts he agreed with. As LDS American history tells us, Jefferson signed his name on the Constitution in small print, respectfully below Ezra Taft Benson, who had spent the morning creatively doodling with several sparkly highlighters, and placing unicorn stickers. These unicorns, in fact, were driving patriotic, moon-bound spaceships and carrying sunflowers, something we can all agree with. The point is clear.
Emery, on the other hand, practically defecates on Jefferson’s ghost’s vaporous forehead when she dares to assert her own theories, which were suspiciously put together in her own mind. She draws conclusions using facts and statistics – statistics that had likely used alcohol before being counted – which came, as Atkinson noted, from some silly and highly questionable website, operated by the church itself. Most dangerously, as Cox points out, her article dares question the eternal philosophical wisdom of 18-year-old Americans, who carry a single book with all of life’s answers. This should not happen in a University setting.
Alex Tarbet