A couple of valley neighbors

We get awfully weary of liberal readers accusing us of giving free rides to conservatives, and of conservative readers who tell us journalists cannot be fair. There is a letter to the editor on page three from Dan Mackenzie that carries such a message about opinion columnist Sheila Leslie.

Let us first explain the function of an opinion columnist. It’s to have and write opinions. We would have thought this was clear, but since it causes Mr. Mackenzie heartburn, and he accuses Leslie of trying “to pass it off as unbiased journalism,” we assume it requires explanation.

Columnist Leslie wrote in our June 21 edition about the snatching of children from migrant families, the same topic that nearly everyone in the nation was discussing at the time, so Mr. Mackenzie’s distress is difficult to fathom.

“She mentions Trump’s recent implementation of a ’zero tolerance’ policy started this year,” Mr. Mackenzie wrote. “If she means the continuation of the law Obama failed to change during his almost decade-long administration, then I will concede she just didn’t express herself adequately enough.”

In fact, as numerous fact checkers—including Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes—have reported, under presidents Bush II and Obama zero tolerance criminal prosecutions were only occasional, and families were only rarely separated. It was under Donald Trump that all alleged violators were charged criminally, and only Trump’s attorney general said publicly that “we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you” (May 7).

Our reader further wrote, “Does she have any facts to back up this claim that separating kids from their parents while they are processed ’damages and destroys families?’ I’m guessing anyone that has been drinking the liberal Kool-Aid as long as Leslie clearly has been drinking it hasn’t done any research on that either.”

Columbia University law professor Patricia Williams wrote, “We know that children subjected to this kind of trauma suffer catastrophic damage to the very architecture of their brains. Children who were abandoned in Romanian orphanages, for example, were found to have grown up with less cerebral white and gray matter than their peers raised by parents. Or look at our own foster-care system: It is deeply scarring, even when children are separated from their families to protect them from danger. Forty to 50 percent of children who age out of foster care become homeless within 18 months. And fully half of the nation’s homeless population were foster children at some point.”

Finally, Mr. Mackenzie writes that our columnist “doesn’t want to shed light” on both sides of the dispute. In that connection, we enjoy noting that he accused Obama but not Bush of doing—albeit rarely—what Trump did.

The tone of the letter is the most wearying part. We assume Mr. Mackenzie has never met Ms. Leslie, yet he seems to despise her in the way Moriarity did Holmes, and we are compelled to ask: Why? This once-cooperative and fair society is now a polarized, mean-spirited society because some of us chose to listen to our leaders. Those leaders have reasons for calling on the worst in us. That doesn’t mean we have to listen. Mr. Mackenzie and Ms. Leslie are members of the same community. They need not be enemies because of a mere difference of opinion.