The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

Web posted September 22, 1997

Editor: The Chronicle:

The infinite capacity of the far Right for shameless hypocrisy is usually amusing. Sometimes, however, it is disgusting. Take, for example, the case of Mother Teresa, the new patron saint of ultra-conservatism. From Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., to broadcast commentator Rush Limbaugh, the politicians and pundits of the right have fallen all over themselves praising her ministry of care to the poor and downtrodden of the world.

They ought to be ashamed of themselves. These sanctimonious souls profess such admiration for Mother Teresa's work among the poor in foreign lands but despise and revile the poor in their own country. It is elementary conservative catechism that America's poor are poor because they are morally inferior; they deserve their fate. Likewise, those afflicted with AIDS.

If Mother Teresa had brought her ministry of charity and compassion to America's poor and downtrodden, she would have been pilloried in the right-wing press and vilified on hate-radio as a ``poverty-whacko'' and a ``compassion-Nazi.''

Spare us the crocodile tears. God has called the soul of his saint home to rest with him in peace forever. It is a shame that no earthly power can protect her memory from desecration of right-wing grave robbers.

Jay Connail, Augusta