. . . The Houston Chronicle.
November 7, 2017
The Houston Chronicle
4747 Southwest Freeway
Houston, Texas 77027
Account Number: *******
To The Houston Chronicle:
Please cancel my subscription and refund the balance of my account.
As a graduate of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (M.S. 1971, Pulitzer Fellow) and a former reporter for The Houston Post, I act with considerable sorrow. I love newspapers. Receiving each morning a plastic bag filled with news, commentary, and other useful and interesting information—well, this has always seemed important, entertaining, even right. Unfolding the newsprint. Breathing in the musty ink. Losing myself in the flow of words and ideas. These pleasurable habits have sustained me for some considerable number of decades.
I am, however, also and foremost a Christian. As such . . .
. . . I can no longer support a newspaper that, through its editorial board, holds in contempt the Christian faith and its beliefs and practices. I refer, of course, to today’s editorial, “Another massacre: Elected officials need to go beyond ‘thoughts and prayers’ and address gun violence.”
I’ll leave it to the “thoughts” crowd to respond as it wishes. As a member of the “prayers” community, however, two straws broke the back of what was left of my respect for the Chronicle. One was the newspaper’s contempt for prayer. The other was the accompanying attitude—self-righteous, rigidly moralistic, sarcastic, furious, strangely joyful.
The last paragraph of the editorial—which also throws in a dollop of contempt for the U.S. Constitution— imagines a Utopia where Progressive political principles have overcome sin and created heaven on earth. When all critics—deplorable and irredeemable, by the lights of some on the left—have been silenced.
Someday a wave of outrage and revulsion will sweep across this country. It will leave in its cleansing wake elected officials who sold their souls to the NRA, whose warped view of the tangled words of the Constitution unleashed orgies of death. We look forward to that day, no matter how far off. When it comes, we’ll be happy to offer our deathly silent leaders our sincerest T&P.
On this happy day, would the Chronicle then offer its sincerest thoughts and prayers? No, it would offer its sincerest T&P. This is mockery, sarcasm, and moral preening. It’s sophomoric. It’s a nudge in the ribs of fellow Progressives, inviting one last laugh at the folly of believers. It is not serious. It is indecent and unworthy of an adult.
The Chronicle could have made its case for gun control without disparaging prayers or believers, but the newspaper preferred to trivialize and personalize the argument.
Yes, I know the Chronicle built a rhetorical firewall into the column, declaring “respect [for] the faith and beliefs of every person.” Others may accept that distinction. For me, however, it is no sale. To demean a fellow believer who counsels and practices prayer is to demean me, even if (perhaps especially if) the fellow believer is an elected government official.
To the Chronicle, it’s your newspaper. I respect your right to believe and act as you wish, but I will no longer help pay the salaries of editorial writers who take the other side on questions of God, faith, and prayer, and who treat me and others who hold opinions outside Progressive orthodoxy, not just as mistaken, but as evil.
I will also counsel fellow believers to rethink their subscriptions to a newspaper that holds their beliefs and values to have less value than the political principles of the American left.
With respect for the good that newspapers, including the Chronicle, can do and have done, with sorrow at parting company, and with a prayer that The Houston Chronicle finds its way back to a place worthy of respect,
Darrell Hancock
[This version of the letter slightly edited to better express a point that was less than clear in the original. DDH]
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