OPINION:
Bruce Lawlor’s Commentary piece (“Authoritarianism and division,” Web., Jan. 11) opens with a brilliant and very articulate analysis of how President Obama’s actions are strikingly similar to the actions employed by dictators who rule through an authoritarian approach. Unfortunately, the piece takes an unexpected and disturbing turn when Mr. Lawlor attempts to illustrate how a president should conduct himself.
Mr. Lawlor writes that after the Civil War, President Lincoln dealt kindly with “people who had taken up arms against his administration, to establish a different government, an evil one … ” These people are described as Lincoln’s “enemies.” In fact these 260,000 fellow Americans of ours who died for the Confederacy did so seeking only to be left alone, defending their states’ legal right to be free and independent states, just as the colonists had done in seeking freedom from British rule. Lincoln himself had defended a state’s right to secede by declaring in an 1862 letter that “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable, a sacred right.”
I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Lawlor for his service to our great nation, but I respectfully ask him to revisit his views on the Civil War and those who gave their lives during it. The use of terms such as “evil” and “enemy” in reference to Americans is something our president does in his quest to divide and disparage those who disagree with him; we conservatives should not follow suit.
MARY BETH ELLIS
Manassas
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