To the Editor:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I was glad to read Michael Miner’s and his correspondent David Peterson’s characterization of Sun-Times columnist Dennis Byrne as a raving “right-wing lunatic” [Hot Type, January 6] because the increasing dominance of religious right editorial views at the Sun-Times is troubling. Amazingly, Byrne has written that he has “always thought [he] was pretty liberal,” and as recently as November, of his resentment at being “called a conservative.” This from a columnist who demanded punishment of a pregnant woman who refused to allow surgical delivery of her baby, who believes landlords should have the right to refuse tenants whom they consider sexually immoral, who favors the replacement of welfare payments with orphanages, who favors single-sex public schooling, who demands intolerance of promiscuity among teens, who urges parents to forbid masturbation, who urges adults to “correct” strange children whom they observe misbehaving in public, who defended Pat Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech, and who has himself written time and again of the manifest superiority of European cultural and religious traditions, which he thinks Native Americans and African Americans should consider more a deliverance than an imposition.
N. Dearborn
