How fitting that Steve Erickson’s letter to the editor appeared in the same issue which screamed his protest to the LGBTAA vigil on page one.

Well, Steve, if you want to be right-wing in the privacy of your own home, you have that right and I would fight to the death to guarantee you that right as provided by our great country. But the second you get on your soapbox and start pushing your beliefs on others, you’d better take cover. The good people of the world will respond in unison that they do not support you. The stones will begin to fly at you my friend. You’d better get a Kevlar vest anytime you step through my ‘hood because I don’t like people like you. You think there’s a cultural war, pal? Well, there is now.

“There’s a lot of people on campus who would have serious objections to their student money being used to promote the homosexual agenda.” No, Steve. There’s just you. You belong to a vast MINORITY of religious, Christian Coalition, bible-beating crazies who are scared to death of anyone who doesn’t adopt their skewed sense of morality.

You jump up and down and you berate Sarah Leonard as a fascist? Fascism is not, as you suggest, the regulation of the economy to the point where business is no longer profitable. Fascism IS government with a totalitarian dictator who suppresses its political opposition and usually includes a policy of belligerent nationalism or racism. Don’t confuse a political ideology with an economic one. If you don’t agree, ask the Nazi businessmen who made fortunes in fascist Germany on the backs of slave labor. They didn’t see fascism as economically limiting in the least. You know who IS a fascist, Stevie boy? You are.

In your remarks to the Daily, you talk about the LGBTAA pressing a political agenda. And then you press yours with your diatribe extolling the supposed virtues of Jim Ross Lightfoot. You want to silence the LGBTAA, thereby limiting the very rights that preserve our democratic society, preventing it from moving towards your right-wing facism (the terms are synonymous).

I’ve got news for you. Lightfoot was my Southwest Iowa representative for nearly a decade. He is well-renowned in my part of the state as a first-class idiot.

If he hadn’t run against second-class idiots every election, his political career would have been short, short, short!

Oh, how I giggle when I see the ads that say, “Iowa needs Lightfoot.” Iowa doesn’t need Lightfoot. Lightfoot doesn’t even want to be the Governor of Iowa. He wants to be Iowa’s United States Senator.

He’s only running for governor in 1998 because in the 1996 U.S. Senate election Tom Harkin kicked his ass! How quickly we forget.

Now I don’t know if Iowa needs Tom Vilsack. But like Sarah Leonard said while exercising her rights, we need him a lot more than we do Lightfoot. And if people like you are Lightfoot’s “field representatives,” then I really don’t like the guy.

By the way, isn’t Lightfoot of Native American descent? You and the other Republicans might want to get together and check his background because he might not meet the 7/8 caucasian requirement for you to name him Supreme Imperial Grand-Old-Party Wizard over the Sovereign State of Iowa.

I considered voicing my opposition to you personally, but I wasn’t sure where the Ames Ku Klux Klan meets.

You go ahead, Steve. You go on listening to Rush Limbaugh and you goose-step your way to class for the rest of your senior year. The world will be hard enough on you, dear friend. Those with viewpoints as limited as yours have relegated themselves to an existence outside the confines of polite society. I don’t pretend to know what color the sky is in the world that you live in, but in the Iowa in which I grew up, the blue sky extends softly over decent, humble, hard-working, respectable Iowa citizens. Respectable, sensible and compassionate people who grieve the violent death of any person — regardless of wealth, rank, color, religion or sexual orientation. They grieve the death of the gay kid in Wyoming as much as any other.

You should have voted to give a hundred bucks for the vigil, Steve. You’ve singled yourself out. Unlike your flaming homophobia which despises all gays, I don’t hate all Republicans, conservatives or religious activists. Some are decent folks, Steve. No, I don’t despise them or blame them for the problems of the world. I just hate you.

Matthew T. Jennings

Junior

English and finance