Porn czar gone wild

(Greensboro, NC) There is a world of difference between spirited debate and an unhinged, mendacious and hysterical attack. Joe Guarino turns to the later in writing about Greensboro's "porn debate." In his frighening screed, he

• Suggests library employees should be arrested for content a patron accessed on a computer.
  
• Repeated a falsity about the number of "visits" to "porn" sites at the library even after his previous use of the number was demonstrated to him to be in error.
  
• Uses innuendo to impugn a reporter by implying that her husband has an immoral "worldview."
  
• Ascribed, with no uncertainty, religious hostility to local media institutions with only his own suspicion as self-enforcing evidence.
  
• So badly distorts what he presents as facts, that in some cases they are, in reality, the opposite of what he says.
  
• Casts judgment on those public officials who rejected knee-jerk reactions and voted for a calmer approach as "amoral." (While, hypocritically, elsewhere quoting Matthew 7:1 from the Bible)

This is extremism at its worst. I hope our decision makers are paying attention. Is this the kind of "morality" around which we will shape public policy? Surely not.