Sir, - You quote Sinn Fein Cllr Larry O'Toole complaining that the Orange Order parade would be "like inviting the Ku Klux Klan to march in Alabama" (March 22nd). It's about time that tired canard was laid to rest.
Before I took Anglican Orders in my dotage I was for many years a civil rights attorney and activist in America. I marched with Martin Luther King in Washington in August 1963. I was a volunteer attorney for some years for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Marching where you are not wanted is what freedom is all about. Few people remember that the great August 29th, 1963, march was against the Kennedy brothers - President Jack and Attorney General Robert - who cowered in the White House that day surrounded by police and armed troops since we were complaining about their inaction to civil rights demands. As for rights to march where they are not wanted, the great test of the ACLU in America was the demand of the American Nazi party to march through Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish community. But as true upholders of the rights of the unpopular, we swallowed hard and supported their legal rights.
I want to make clear that I in no way condone the bigotry of the Orange Order. I have met with the residents of Garvaghy Road and understand their sense of siege each Drumcree Sunday. I am an active member of the Church of Ireland Catalyst movement which urged the Drumcree rector and the Anglican Primate to cancel the service which is regularly used as a pretence to intimidate the Catholic community of Portadown. But essentially when it comes to exercising a valued right, the Orange Order is in the same position as the civil rights demonstrators in Derry on that fateful Bloody Sunday.
Sinn Fein needs to learn and respect some fundamental human rights as it moves into the democratic mainstream and leaves its past history of sympathy with Stalinism and fascism. The price of a free society is to give free right of expression to views which most of us find abhorrent. May Cllr O'Toole some day make the move into the rarefied air of true freedom. - Yours, etc.,
Rev Dr Gordon Graham, Newcastle, Co Down.