I was just talking to someone on some community or another about crazy people who write letters to the paper, and it made me think of this ridiculous controversy at the center of the letters page in Dayton's paper lately. The Dayton Islamic Society recently applied for permission to build a mosque in one of the snotty New Rich suburbs south of town. A little while before the zoning board turned down their application, it came out that a Baptist mega-church nearby had been stumping for support in blocking the mosque. You know the reputation Cincinnati has (or had on the 1980s and 1990s) for being a bunch of small-town crazy conservatives in a medium-sized city? Dayton wishes it was Cincinnati and tries to outdo it by being even crazier. The sort of people who make Dayton special yowling at each other in the letters column and the paper's anonymous phone-in comment column have been amusing enough, but now the wife of the mega-church's minister has written a four-column-long letter that more or less amounts to "We did not either say that! And if we did, well, how do you expect Christians not to bash other religions?"

I've been thinking about maybe posting something on it over at fw_offine, but I'm not sure the lulz would translate well across mediums. While it fills me with glee and is fun in a dishy oh-no-they-di'nt way, I'm not sure that the humor doesn't depend on knowing the Dayton area. For example, the other major story in the paper about now is that Dayton is trying to figure out how to attract "a creative class" to make up for the fact that no one wants to live here any longer than they have to, but they don't seem to have worked out that making ourselves look like a bunch of xenophobic hicks isn't the way to go about doing that. I'm not sure I've found any quotes that are hilarious except for being about a situation that's so absurd.

So does the novelty of it happening in real life outweigh the srs bizness that is religious intolerance? And then, if I post it to fw_offline which probably has all of three people watching it, does it really matter?