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To the editors:
I am stunned by Michael Miner's reply to an enraged letter [May 14] criticizing his editorial about how few women are urging U.S. intervention in Bosnia [Hot Type, April 23]. The writer told Miner he ought to know that many women may want troops to go, but they weren't "naive" enough to think that our "good old American boys" wouldn't rape Bosnian women like the Serbs do. She digressed into a lengthy complaint about the Reader not employing enough women, and asked Miner for his views.
Miner ignored almost all of the letter while cleverly exceeding the writer's fears for Bosnian women. He quoted a woman who doesn't want troops sent because they would rape Bosnian women like Serbs do. He added no thoughts of his own to the two women's frighteningly biased, ugly statements against men, which were exactly the sort that the right wing's political-correctness hoax were founded upon.
Maybe the Reader does need a quota of women to do its job better. But it certainly needs a senior editor who can answer criticism better than Miner did here, and who doesn't stoop to using one bigot to attack another.
Mave Lawler N. Halsted
Michael Miner replies:
Let's see if I follow this. Two women who disagree on whether the U.S. should intervene in Bosnia are bigots who have made "frighteningly biased, ugly statements against men" because both decry the raping of women by soldiers during war. From such canards the "right wing's political correctness hoax" has sprung. OK, gotcha.
