Response to hateful letter

We have received a lot of responses from a Letter to the Editor we ran in this paper on April 11.

Thank you.

This is my third school year being on the editorial board of the Statesman and I have seen many Letters to the Editor that make me cringe, including this one. Too often the ones that are upsetting are met with no response from readers.

This is, in my head, either because people aren’t reading or people don’t care. While the former is more likely, the latter scares me. So honestly, I was happy to see people angrily writing in about the letter, because it assured me that people were as upset about that way of thinking as I was.

The letter was terrible. It was written from a narrow-minded point of view from a small person. I know that; everyone on the editorial board knows that. So allow me to explain why it was printed.

This is our policy with Letters to the Editor: We run them unless they personally attack a person who is not a public figure. As is the norm for newspapers across the nation, the views expressed in these do not represent the opinion of the Statesman. We just provide the space, not the opinion. In many cases, such as this, we hate the content but believe in allowing views to be expressed.

I believe it would be irresponsible for us to pick and choose what would go in as Letters to the Editor, because then we would potentially be silencing opinions we don’t agree with and not allowing for an open discussion. That is why we stick to a strict policy on that. It is not for us to decide what our readers can handle as an opinion.

It has been pointed out to us that the person was not a member of the community. Something we knew. This individual is from Illinois. He is a member of an anti-LGBT advocacy group, as we found out later, and the letter may have been a mass email, but it was submitted to us. We have had discussions on looking into if letters sent in bulk to numerous publications will make our pages in the future, but that is for next year’s editorial board to decide.

We also have a policy for allowing letters from people outside the university and immediate community. We are at a university. Utah State boasts students and faculty from all 50 states and a multitude of countries. It is not a matter of geographic community. People come from all different communities and are represented at this university. In addition, people could end up in any community worldwide after they graduate. To limit views and opinions based off of a 20-mile radius of Old Main would be doing these people a disservice. Their background likely isn’t Cache Valley and their future likely isn’t in Cache Valley.

I want to reiterate I hated the letter. But we strive to serve as an open plane of discussion. This often doesn’t get used, however. So I implore anyone moved to anger and frustration by this letter to write in. I would happily order more pages if they were going to be flooded with opinions of support for the LGBT community.

—Jeffrey Dahdah is a senior majoring in journalism. Please write to him or send him letters to the editor at @dahdahjm@gmail.com or on twitter @dahdahjeff.