Wintroub addresses last week's letter about courthouse prayer

Dear Editor,

This is regarding that letter from “Concerned Citizens of Johnson County” (hereafter referred to as “CCOJC”) in the 8/13/14 The Tomahawk: what silliness.
Starting with the letter’s headline “Citizens claim they were denied prayer at courthouse”. Nobody was — or can be — denied prayer at a courthouse or anywhere else. You wanna pray, pray. What they MAY have been denied is permission to have a meeting on the courthouse steps. Not permitting a bunch of people to block the main entrance to a courthouse seems pretty reasonable to me, at least if the blockage was going to take place while official business was being conducted in the courthouse.
But the “horror”, the absolute “travesty” of having to take their prayer gathering across the street and down a block! To a church yet! Doing your praying at a church??? Whoever heard of such paganism?
And how’s this for silly: with elections coming up — oops, they missed that boat, didn’t they — CCOJC want others to be made aware of the ones not permitting this blockage. But they don’t even mention who these “ones” are!
And then there’s this capstone of silliness… They complain that “Unfortunately a few people are making decisions that affect all in the county without the whole county’s being involved.” First, this decision most certainly did NOT affect “all in the county”. Furthermore, if CCOJC are referring to some unnamed elected official(s) who decided CCOJC would have to take their gathering elsewhere, well duhhhh: elected officials’ very job is to make decisions. There are no, zero, nada decisions made with “the whole county” being involved.
On an unrelated matter, I for one appreciate the proofreading, proper grammar and spelling in CCOJC’s letter. Those are too rare in the pages of The Tomahawk. But who addresses the editor of this paper as “Dear Sirs”?

Terry Wintroub
Mountain City