To The Reader’s Forum:

Taking issue with the Star Spangled Banner, a university law professor I have been conversing with commended Colin Kaepernick and others “taking a knee” during the national anthem. Not only that, he wants the national anthem to be permanently discarded for its racism. Regarding Francis Scott Key as “extremely evil” for owning slaves, the Star Spangled Banner, he contends, is tied too closely to the sordid past of slavery and therefore no longer belongs as our country’s cherished national anthem. Following his logic, I replied, “Why should any American be a member of the Democrat Party so closely associated with a racist past of policies that perpetuated and defended slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination and was prominently influenced by the KKK?” He didn’t really have an answer for that one.

To the glee of the KKK, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, outlined a plan for stopping the growth of the Black community. “We do not want word to go out,” she said, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Strangely enough, she sought to worm her way into the black church to accomplish her evil scheme. Receiving an award in her name, a well-known woman in 2009 said, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously… There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life, from the causes she launched and fought for and scarified for so greatly.” I wonder if one of those causes she had in her mind included the one Sanger led to the reduce the black population. Isn’t Planned Parenthood, a dominant abortion provider, heavily concentrated in black urban areas? By the way, the woman proud to receive the Sanger award and was Hillary.

Even though secretly recorded in 2005, Trump has no excuse for the tawdry remarks of a sexual predator. Michele Obama ripped into Trump for that exchange. Rick Ross glorifies date rape. Besides grotesque sexually explicit lyrics, Common raps to variant uses of the N word. You can’t get more deplorable than the lewd and crude content of sexual objectification offered up by rappers invited to the White House by Michele and her husband. Is Michele’s attack on Trump morally principled or politically partisan?

This election may not so much about who we have as candidates, but where we are at as a culture. Even so, as one pastor has commented to me, our choice is between Samson and Jezebel. With God’s help, choose wisely.

The Rev. Mel McGinnis

Frewsburg