At left is Kirby Delauter, embarrassingly funny. At right is Matt Trewhella, not funny at all and very embarrassing.
I’ve covered some clueless public officials in my 35-year newspaper career, but I never had the pleasure of covering anyone so wonderfully out of touch as Kirby Delauter.
If you haven’t heard of him, that shouldn’t be too surprising. He is a councilman for Frederick County, Maryland, a position that is not normally a springboard to national recognition.
Ed Kemmick
But Kirby Delauter rose above his humble station last week when he declared on his personal Facebook page that he would sue the local newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, if it ever again published his name, viz., Kirby Delauter, without his permission.
It is remarkable that a man socially aware enough to use Facebook would not have anticipated what would happen next. The story went national, then global, in no time at all. The newspaper he threatened to sue suddenly found itself flooded with digital visitors.
On Saturday, Terry Headlee, the newspaper’s managing editor, published a column describing some of the reaction:
“Our website topped more than 5,000 users at one point—roughly the same time that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trashing Delauter during her nightly cable program.
“By Wednesday morning, the story had caught up with the Baltimore and Washington media. During the lunch hour, we had five different television stations in our lobby and newsroom. Dozens of other interview requests came from television, radio and newspapers from at least 20 states, including CNN, The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun. The story went global. We even heard from a newspaper in Australia.”
Headlee also deserves some praise for having said, in an earlier news story on the flap: “Kirby Delauter can certainly decline to comment on any story. But to threaten to sue a reporter for publishing his name is so ridiculously stupid that I’m speechless.”
It’s nice to see an editor, whom one would normally expect to be conciliatory, speaking so tartly.
Kirby Delauter was merely being a jackass, good for a laugh. There is nothing remotely funny about Matt Trewhella, a Christian jihadist who has endorsed murdering doctors who perform abortions and who has said vile things about gay people.
He hates gay people so badly, in fact, that he even hates straight people who refuse to share his hate. He once said, while hosting a TV show: “I have no respect for people who are parents, who actually have children, and have no problem with homosexuality or homosexual marriage. They are the most base people on the planet to have abandoned every God-given vestige to protect your child from the filth of homosexuality. To blatantly go along with it is disgusting.”
The far-right Republican lawmakers who invited this unrepentant hate-monger to our Capitol defended his “sermon” on the grounds that Trewhella has a right to free speech. If I may quote the editor from Maryland, that stance is so ridiculously stupid that I’m, well, speechless.
Of course Trewhella has free-speech rights. If he wants to go on some jihadist TV show and spew hate, or mount a soapbox in the lunatics corner of some public park, godspeed! What is indefensible is that people elected to serve the state of Montana would invite this man to sully the most prominent public building in the state.
True, Trewhella did not devote his speech to calls for murder or to anti-gay ravings. He “merely” called on Montana legislators to defy “the federal tyrants,” and told them that “divine law trumps man’s laws” and that “divine laws are only found in the holy scriptures.”
No, no, no, a thousand times no, thank God. Divine law trumps man’s laws only in a handful of backward countries or in portions of countries controlled by groups like ISIS. Here, at least in the civilized portions of this civilized country, it is understood that we are governed by the Constitution, a civil document crafted by men, many of them Christian in name only.
We need more public servants like Kirby Delauter, willing to embarrass themselves no end while boosting the fortunes of newspapers. We don’t need public servants like those who invited Matt Trewhella to the Capitol, embarrassing the entire state.
