Fact Check

More Modern Way of Living

Text reproduces letter to the editor from a 'proud Democrat'?

Published Feb. 11, 2013

Claim:

Claim:   Text reproduces letter to the editor from a "proud Democrat."


MIXTURE


Example:   [Collected via e-mail, February 2013]


I just came across a post on Facebook that seems too far fetch to believe. It's suppose to be a news article sent to the editor against gun control... It's states as a Democrat and fussing at Republicans as hiding behind the constitution to scare people and how the president is trying to make gun laws stricter for everyone like they are where he came from.
 

Beaufort, N.C.

Jan. 17, 2013

TO THE EDITOR:

Republicans and "so-called" conservatives are at it again. They are claiming that the Constitution gives people the right to have guns without the permission of the government. If that were true, then how could New York and Chicago have laws against it?

We Democrats are sick and tired of Republicans constantly using the Constitution to cover up their true plans, which are to make us all afraid of everyone else. Our great president came from a civilized part of the country where there is strict gun control, and he is only trying to bring the benefits of that more modern way of living to the rest of us. I don't know the exact statistics, but I'm quite certain that Chicago is a lot safer than Morehead City, when it comes to gun violence.

But do Republicans and conservatives listen to the voice of reason? No, of course not. All they want to do is whine and complain about how gun control and wealth

redistribution violate the Constitution, as if the Constitution were all that great, anyway. There are a lot of things that need to be changed about the Constitution, I'd say, and President Obama needs to change it.

The Republicans are just trying to stand in the way, because the president is black. They even dared to question whether he was born in this country. I think all this demonstrates that the Constitution needs to be amended when it comes to the qualifications for being president. Right now, it says that a person has to be 35 years old and be a natural born citizen. Well, that is obviously unfair because there are a great many otherwise qualified people who cannot run for president because their mothers had to have a C-section. But because the Constitution was written a hundred years ago, nobody even thought of the discrimination that would result from a doctor having to deliver a baby in this unnatural way. Now that we Democrats are in control of the government, that's just one more thing we should change in our drive to make life fair.

Please withhold my name because I don't want to get crank calls.

PROUD TO BE A DEMOCRAT


 

Origins:   The farcical missive reproduced above is "true" in the very broad sense that it is in fact a letter to the editor which was published (under the title "More Modern Way of Living") by a regular newspaper, in this case the 29 January 2013 edition of the Carteret County (North Carolina) News-Times. That publication later prefaced the online version of the letter with an editor's note stating that:



The following Letter to the Editor, published in the Jan. 23 edition, has gone viral on the Web after a reader linked it to a Fox News Facebook page. It had received more than 4,000 comments and been shared more than 12,000 times by [the following week].

Whether this letter is "real" in the sense that its writer intended it to be taken literally by readers is something that can't be answered definitively (since the author is not identified by name), but almost certainly it was penned as a spoof of Democrats rather than as an earnest letter from a Democrat. The tone of the letter is tongue-in-cheek throughout, implausibly consisting of nothing but multiple obvious absurdities piled one atop another and recycling a number of old jokes, such as the notion that a person born by Cesarean section is not considered a natural-born citizen and the humorous stereotype of the individual who publicly proclaims himself as being "proud" of his membership in a particular group yet insists on remaining anonymous.

Last updated:   11 February 2013

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

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