Background: Two years ago, I wrote an article for the Willamette Valley (Portland, OR) chapter of the Society for Technical Communication about networking opportunities at the Portland Chamber of Commerce. It’s out there on their web site.
This morning I received an email from some random stranger who apparently found my article and thought that I should be aware of his feelings and that maybe I would pass his idiot message along. I’m tempted to not cut out his name and email address so you can all flood him with fan mail, but I’ll edit it.
Subject: visiting Portland
I would like to find a way to assure the Chamber of Commerce can be made aware of my feelings about visiting Portland. I sent a message through the Business Alliance page, but I also found your newsletter and thought I would send you the message in hope you could pass it on. This is what I wrote:
To whom it may concern,
My wife and I have enjoyed visiting your wonderful city for many years, and make a point of staying downtown for at least one weekend each year. It is with great sadness and disappointment that we will no longer visit Portland, as long as the laws of man, laws of nature, and laws of God are blatantly violated by allowing homosexuals to invade the institution of marraige. Marraige is too sacred and special to be corrupted in this way. I realize our decision may be insignificant to the city, however, I cannot in good conscience financialy support commerce in a city that has become so corrupted and rejects common sense in such a fashion.Respectfully,
[Full Name of Idiot]Thank you very much.
[First Name of Idiot — what, are we on a first-name basis now?]
Oy.
– Kate O’
Are you writing him back to let him know that you’re delighted about what’s going on in Portland, thanks?
::nod:: and i’m *so* sure that portland hates losing it’s bigoted tourists…after all, every city needs a pocket of seething hate, right?
It would truly be funny if you could write him back with something like “I’m bi, but thank you for your letter.” Of course, he could be psycho enough to try and keep correspondence with you to “convert” you. Maybe you could write the letter and not mail it?
Portland being Portland, it’s probably not thrilled with losing any tourism dollars. (The city isn’t that radical, IME.) Good for it for standing up for principle anyway.
I don’t think I would have described his letter as being from a place of seething hate–this is not one of the people who’d try to hurt or kill anyone. I do think that he’s fundamentally misunderstanding the separation of church and state and that therefore applying his principles to what the state is doing makes no sense.
It amazes me that he’d send it to you and not the paper.
Most ironic. 🙂
If I were responding, I’d probably say something like, “Thank you for helping keep Portland free of bigotry…”
“Get over yourself” is generally what comes to mind when I receive stuff like that.
Almost exactly. I wrote: