To the Editor:

The title and picture associated with your Nov. 2 editorial entitled “Hate and intolerance are masquerading as traditional values” is (ironically) intolerant and hateful all by itself. What is that expression? “A single picture is worth a thousand words.”

The picture features a mask with the words “traditional values” on it and is surrounded by hateful images and offensive language. Not everyone who holds traditional values are hateful and intolerant. It is unfortunate that your editorial from the get-go is doing exactly the opposite of what you say needs to be done.

You wrote, “Civil discourse based on truth is the way to move forward.” It isn’t true that people like me who hold traditional values are hateful and intolerant, are Nazis, KKK members, or do hateful things, or use offensive language. Starting off your editorial that way doesn’t exactly inspire someone like me, who holds traditional values, to read on.

Toward the end of your editorial you wrote, “Vilifying people who disagree with us doesn’t let us move forward” but that is exactly what happens all too often for those of us who do hold traditional values. Those of us who are “pro-life” are called anti-woman. Those of us who believe in traditional marriage are called homophobic. Those of us who oppose illegal immigration are called racists.

These are the things many conservatives like me are called by liberals, not because we are actually doing anything hateful or intolerant, but simply because we hold these views which differ from their own. I sometimes wonder if liberals that do this really understand the definition of tolerance, that being “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions, beliefs, and practices that differ from one’s own.”

Newspaper and magazine editors, the media, Hollywood, and college professors across this country need to start being tolerant themselves before telling the rest of us to do so. They need to stop being prejudiced against those of us who hold traditional values!

They need to stop perpetuating the lie that we are hateful and intolerant just because of the views we hold.  Maybe then, as you say, we can all engage in civil discourse and move forward.

Catherine Cunningham

Voorheesville

Editor’s note: The drawing was responding to a comment from a letter writer that, because The Altamont Enterprise supported a local high school having all-gender bathrooms, it was no longer “the small-town, God-fearing, hometown, traditional-values newspaper I have revered all these years.” It illustrated the way traditional values could be used as a mask for hate, which doesn’t mean that all people who hold traditional values are hateful.