For as much as I admire Leonard Pitts Jr.’s usual trenchant insight, I was disappointed to see him become a victim of his own rhetoric in his “Open letter to Sen. Marco Rubio: What is ‘enough?’” (May 3, 13A)
Here, Pitts repeats a question he asked of Rubio earlier: “What is the functional difference between being a bigot and supporting one?” Rubio apparently ignored the question, so Pitts answered for him: “The answer, which you couldn’t bring yourself to give, is that there is none.” So, for all practical purposes, “if you vote for a bigot, then you are a bigot.”
Although I have no doubt that President Donald Trump’s bigotry was a big part of his appeal for many older, white males scared “spitless,” I think Pitts is less than fair to label all of the 63 million Trump voters as bigots.
Resorting to name-calling, the either-or fallacy and the false analogy to Rubio’s own Cuban ethnicity, Pitts equates “no functional difference” to “no difference at all.” He uses the research of two University of Kansas professors to create his own version of an “alternative fact.”
As a result, he appears to shut down the very dialogue in which he himself engages.
James Heiman
Independence
