Editor, Gazette-Journal:

I am appalled to open our local paper and find a lengthy article detailing the ugly tone and content that evidently was the focus of the so-called "Peninsula Patriots" meeting at Lighthouse Worship Center in Gloucester last week.

This article reports that the speaker, who calls himself "Bishop Jackson," carried the crowd into a fervor as he assailed our president, made references that invite paranoid thinking (to an "evil leadership" supposedly international in scope), labeled our national leaders "anti-Christian"—and threw in a good dose of homophobia to round out his pitch.

Nowhere is "Bishop Jackson" recorded as offering constructive, realistic suggestions to move forward our national dialogue, and nowhere does he offer to "reach across the aisle" and work in a real and planful sense with people with whom he disagrees. It is just this self-serving, dramatic and emotional behavior that ...