At a recent ceremony honoring English majors at IUPUI, McPhee took advantage of an opportunity to speak to students about the value of English Studies and turned it into her own political forum by devoting half of her talk to her recent NUVO article on Christians and the KKK -- totally inappropriate for an awards ceremony meant to honor students! Some of those attending probably had little context for her inflammatory comments and heard only that she was equating Christians with the KKK. (Although she later made a vague reference to “what was going on at the Statehouse,” she did not explicitly mention the proposed ban on gay marriage.) While the KKK may claim to be based on biblical beliefs, any thinking person knows that the abhorrent views of the KKK do not represent today’s Christian community – evangelical or otherwise. McPhee declared that her comparison was justified, point-by-point; however, I have heard no reports of evangelical Christians running around in white hoods burning crosses and beating up gays. I’m sure she will argue that she qualified her verbal assault when she said "SOME evangelical Christians”; however, her religious slurs were offensive and insulting to the Christian community as a whole. She apparently believes that it is somehow acceptable to discriminate against Christians as long as you disagree with their views. Christians can exercise their First Amendment rights to express their religious views, and when others choose to discriminate against them in a public forum, they are also exercising their First Amendment rights. However, is this the way to embrace diversity? Diversity means “accepting, respecting, and recognizing individual differences…along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political views, languages, or ideologies.” Perhaps McPhee will recognize this excerpt? It is from the English Department’s diversity statement. Promoting progressive views about one group while bashing another hardly seems to be honoring diversity. Any Christians attending the awards program certainly would have felt no respect, only McPhee’s disdain. I’m sure McPhee will get a good laugh from this message. When she’s done laughing, perhaps she should advise the English Department to find future speakers that respect their diversity statement and don’t model religious intolerance for their students.

Laura McPee, sorry McPhee, is always writing with presumption. Check your facts, little girly.

I think Laura might enjoy the following brief paragraph from journalist, essayist and proto-libertarian H. L. Mencken, written in 1924: "Four or five years ago, when the Ku Klux Klan first got on its legs, I made certain inquiries into its origin and nature, and came to the conclusion that it was no more than the Anti-Saloon League in a fresh bib and tucker, and that, in consequence, its head men were mainly Baptist and Methodist clergymen. That conclusion, printed in this place [the Baltimore Sun], caused protests, and one amiable Baptist clergyman had at me to the extent of two columns. But who denies the fact today? Surely no one of any intelligence. The Klan, studied at length, turns out to be exactly what the Anti-Saloon League is: a device for organizing the hatreds of evangelical Christians."

You equating Eric Miller’s group to the Klan has to be the most irresponsible piece of “journalism” I’ve read in years. As a life-long liberal, I found it an insult to progressive journalists everywhere. You give liberalism a bad name. No wonder NUVO has become irrelevant.

Laura McPhee is NUVOs finest writer. There I said it. That doesn't mean that ANY writer for NUVO has a realistic political worldview. It's those tiny stretches of the imagination (in order to make a stronger point) that destroys their credibility. There are rules to good writing. One of the main ones is that facts should speak for themselves and that emotions be held in reserve. The KKK comparison to conservative political figures is just a smear and will soon be as tired as comparing all despots to Hitler. Yawn.

I'm kind of sick of Laura McPhee taking up yet more editorial space defending everything she and her writers publish. It's beyond defensive and professional: it's whiny and forum-ish. Write it, publish it and let it go. Leave the debate to readers or cry on the shoulders of your friends over a beer at your favorite pub. In other words, shut up already.