My name is Abigail Knox (formerly Rings). I am a former Campus editor and writer for The Carroll News. I wrote my fair share of controversial articles. Some of those articles even got me questioned by the campus leadership and had papers with my front page stories tossed in the trash by those same campus leaders, but never in my four years with the paper did I see, publish, or edit an article or op-ed that was so blindly hateful and bigoted as the one written by Declan Leary and published and approved by you. It made me deeply ashamed to be an alumna of John Carroll and The Carroll News.

I am all for freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but it seemed like the only point of Leary’s article was to incite hatred and pain. The whole article seemed not only to be an outright expression of hatred, it also seemed to be from the perspective of someone who hates John Carroll and genuinely isn’t happy to be there.

I am so thankful for the education both in the classroom and in life that I received at John Carroll and The Carroll News. Both taught me to have educated and civil conversations with people who I disagreed with and oftentimes caused me to learn something new or look at something in a different way. This was not the case at all with Leary’s article. The language he used was hateful and frankly ineloquent. The drag show is something that yes, is super controversial, but the point of it has always been to expose people to new perspectives. His article and your choice to publish it made John Carroll and The Carroll News look like a place filled with hatred and bigotry and I hope that you realize that what you have done has perpetuated the ever increasing divide in our country.