Sophistry...
Feb 06, 2014 | 939 views | 0 0 comments | 4 4 recommendations | email to a friend | print
Cambridge Dictionaries defines “sophistry” as, “the clever use of arguments that seem true but are really false ... to deceive people.” I submit this is what Mr. James Hofmann is about in his column.

It isn’t a specious patient/country comparison, or Obama as incompetent physician; his column is, first, about the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution. He doesn’t say it, but it’s there, fourth paragraph. The “original intent” business is just lead-in to Mr. Hofmann’s real intent: reminding us of the Creator/God/Ten Commandments foundation without which the U.S. of A. cannot thrive or even survive.

He uses the word, “demise.” Quoting slaveholding Founders who also laughed and scorned the idea of women’s rights doesn’t work anymore. Thus for “original intent.”

Those religious quotes fit nicely with Mr. James Schmidt’s letter on the same T-I page; but it makes Mr. Hofmann’s question, “Do we continue to allow a free expression of religious beliefs in the public square?” unsupportable.

If the letters page in the newspaper isn’t “the public square” what is?

We all know people who believe a Creator God is nothing more than a “sky pixie,” like the Tooth Fairy. Will the letter writers deny those Americans the right to hold those beliefs? No, they won’t, not out loud.

A message for Messrs Schmidt and Hofmann, and I won’t put it in code language the way they did: In a free and open America the majority no longer gets to vote on the rights of a minority. The activist conservative “secular” Supreme Court of the United States says so.

—Kevin B. McGann

Castle Valley
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