This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:

In response to Minnesota Rep.-elect Keith Ellison’s intention to swear his oath of office on the Koran, Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode recently wrote his constituents that to “preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States,” an immigration overhaul was necessary to avoid “many more Muslims elected to office demanding the use of the Quran” and “preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”

Our Founding Fathers happened to clearly define these traditional values and beliefs in the United States Constitution. Article VI of this civil contract states, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation;” therefore, they are not required to swear and there are no references to god in the various oaths of office this document defines. Nowhere does the Constitution mention taking oath on a Bible, and Presidents John Quincy Adams and Franklin Pierce both took their oaths of office on a law books instead.

If Virgil Goode intends to represent Americans, perhaps he should familiarize himself with this document on which all of our traditions and values are based, rather than demand we violate the United States Constitution to satisfy his misguided understanding of our nation’s principles.

This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:

How ironic that an opinion survey on race relations would include the blatant sampling bias inherent in phone interviews. Families that are more financially well off own more phones per person, if they own one at all. Consider some of the homes in Sawyer Town, Herrington, Park, and Hunter streets with numerous poor African Americans living in them. Some of these homes don’t have electricity, much less a phone, and they still use wood stoves for heat.

If 73% of survey respondents were white and 19% were black, in a community where 41.8% of residents are white and 56.6% are black, that means nearly 70% of our African American community members went unrepresented, while Caucasian opinions were given nearly double the weight they actually hold in our population.

So while the Daily Advance thinks it’s nice to know our upper and middle class residents consider race relations a problem, it would be far more useful to know what the majority of impoverished African Americans think. As those who shoulder the deleterious effects of these racial frictions, they could have identified where the problems in our community lay, whether in their employment searches, ability to rent property, or receive fair treatment from law enforcement.

While Caucasians may readily admit there are problems with race relations in EC, this survey clearly demonstrates that we have no idea how it burdens the city’s African American majority. Correction, we now know that we aren’t even sensitive enough to solicit their opinions.