{"id":5148,"date":"2015-01-11T05:07:27","date_gmt":"2015-01-11T12:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=5148"},"modified":"2015-03-26T13:10:27","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T19:10:27","slug":"prairie-lights-if-we-had-to-choose-wed-take-kirby-delauter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/01\/prairie-lights-if-we-had-to-choose-wed-take-kirby-delauter\/","title":{"rendered":"All in all, we prefer Kirby Delauter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Idiots\"<\/a>

At left is Kirby Delauter, embarrassingly funny. At right is Matt Trewhella, not funny at all and very embarrassing.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t heard of him, that shouldn\u2019t be too surprising. He is a councilman for Frederick County, Maryland, a position that is not normally a springboard to national recognition.<\/p>\n

\"Ed<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Terry Headlee, the newspaper\u2019s managing editor, published a column<\/a> describing some of the reaction:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur website topped more than 5,000 users at one point\u2014roughly the same time that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trashing Delauter during her nightly cable program.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Headlee also deserves some praise for having said, in an earlier news story on the flap: \u201cKirby 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice to see an editor, whom one would normally expect to be conciliatory, speaking so tartly.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Here in Montana, I was hoping that an editor or editorial writer would have used similar language in reference to a so-called \u201cElection Sermon\u201d delivered last Sunday, the day before the opening of the 2015 Montana Legislature, by Matt Trewhella, a minister from Wisconsin. (Newspaper style calls for introducing a minister as \u201cthe Rev.,\u201d but I can\u2019t bring myself to do that in this case.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He hates gay people so badly, in fact, that he even hates straight people who refuse to share his hate. He once said<\/a>, while hosting a TV show: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The far-right Republican lawmakers who invited this unrepentant\u00a0hate-monger to our Capitol defended his \u201csermon\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

True, Trewhella did not devote his speech to calls for murder or to anti-gay ravings. He \u201cmerely\u201d called on Montana legislators<\/a> to defy \u201cthe federal tyrants,\u201d and told them that \u201cdivine law trumps man\u2019s laws\u201d and that \u201cdivine laws are only found in the holy scriptures.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, no, no, a thousand times no, thank God. Divine law trumps man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We need more public servants like Kirby Delauter, willing to embarrass themselves no end while boosting the fortunes of newspapers. We don\u2019t need public servants like those who invited Matt Trewhella to the Capitol, embarrassing the entire state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve 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\u2019t heard of him, that shouldn\u2019t be too surprising. He is a councilman for Frederick County, Maryland, a position that is not normally a springboard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1916,1913,1914,1915,1917],"class_list":["post-5148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-frederick-news-post","tag-kirby-delauter","tag-matt-trewhella","tag-montana-capitol","tag-terry-headlee","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}