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Columnist Quits After Being Suspended For Supporting NRA

Allow me to state – right up front – that I am a card-carrying member of the NRA. As well, I use their indoor range whenever possible to shame my male friends into understanding that girls can shoot too, and often better. So there. It’s out. Full disclosure. Now, on to the subject at hand.

It seems that St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Stacey Washington is plum out of a job. She said sayonara to the newspaper after they suspended her for writing a rebuttal to the article they published about the NRA being equated with ISIS. That’s not a typo – the anti-NRA article argues that “more Americans die from guns than from ISIS, [thus] the Second Amendment advocacy group is the greater danger.” (NYP)

Ms. Washington shot back in her column with the following:

“[W]hen has a member of the NRA ever decapitated, set on fire, tossed from a rooftop or otherwise terrorized another American? The linkage is not only rife with improper context; it is false on its face,” Washington wrote in her column, which also decried the lack of conservatives in U.S. newsrooms. “This failure to represent the opposing, especially conservative, view is an increasingly apparent deficit in the news reporting apparatus in our country.”

Here. Here. Ms. Washington not only took on the absurdity of the Post-Dispatch article she called out the paper itself. For her forthrightness, she was suspended from the daily. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. She was suspended for stating her opinion as a columnist – so she quit.

Naturally, the leftists in charge over at Missouri’s paper of record told a different story:

“Her active promotional activities and professional association with the National Rifle Association represented an unacceptable conflict of interest in her most recent column, which resulted in our suspension of her work,” Tod Robberson, the Post-Dispatch’s editorial page editor, wrote in a response to Washington’s suspension and quitting.

Never mind that Ms. Washington was never paid a red cent – not one shekel – for her NRA activities. This means that her volunteer activities have been banned. As a person, Ms. Washington is not permitted to do other things — especially if they have the letters N-R-A attached. So much for First Amendment freedom of speech by the illustrious Fourth Estate.

This action by the Post-Dispatch is fraught with hypocrisy and disgracefully boorish on its face. Are they indolent or simply oblivious to the duplicity of their actions? How so? Here’s a for instance:

Let’s say you write for a newspaper, but you’ve also done local TV ads for the local animal shelter. “Don’t kill the doggies, adopt them.” Then you wrote a column discussing the reason innocent animals should not be put to death. Tut, tut says your newspaper — that’s verboten. Honestly, do you think for a Nano-second that you would be fired for this conflict of interest? Of course not. Everybody believes in saving the doggies and kitties. No newspaper from sea to shining sea would dare suspend you for such a thing.

But the NRA – that’s another story altogether, isn’t it? They’re simply ghastly. They believe Americans should have the right to bear arms. Good grief.

Note to editors and publishers: You people better start to get your act together. Otherwise, places like Liberty Nation will gladly watch the usefulness of your newsprint be relegated to lighting campfires and the bottom of Fluffy’s kitty litter box. Yes, indeed, places like LN exist to put you folks back into your extreme lefty cages where you belong.

But before we sign off on another sad affair of media bias run amok, let’s permit Stacey Washington to have the last word since the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has decided to silence her:

I’m not ashamed that I’m an NRA supporter, a Bible-thumper, that I love Jesus Christ. I’m all the way out there. There’s nothing else that I can do to articulate my perspective any more clearly on where I stand.

Good for you Ms. Washington. And allow me to say that we have an opening here at Liberty Nation and are ready to welcome you with open arms if we don’t meet up at the NRA firing range first.

Read More From Leesa K. Donner

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