Of Newspapers, And Letters

Not much to do on a morning like this except stare out the window at the beauty of the world. So I’m reading newspapers online (no choice—the Bismarck Tribune carriers don’t like to go out on a day like this, and their bosses don’t seem to care, even though I am now paying almost $4 a day to get their five-day-a-week-paper delivered to my door).

I’ll keep shelling it out, because I need my daily paper in the morning. I’ve been reading The Bismarck Tribune for about 70 years, since I was about 8, I think, when they somehow managed to get it to Hettinger on the bus, and my parents subscribed, and a “paper boy,” one of the Samdal or Carroll kids, I think, and hauled it around town in a wagon.

I knew that drill, because I met the train every Sunday morning, 52 weeks a year, and hauled the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune around in my wagon (sled in winter). These days the paper isn’t delivered by “paper boys” pulling wagons any more, but by grownups driving mostly over-used cars around on city streets, terrified by a few inches of white stuff which might make their middle-of-the-night routes hard to navigate on slick, worn, tires. I hardly blame them, I guess. I wish there was a better way. Like wagons. Or sleds.

But I digress. I want to share something with you today that I read in my favorite paper, The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. I can’t recall right now how much I pay for a subscription to Forum Communications’ North Dakota papers (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown and Dickinson), but it’s a pittance compared to The Tribune. So now, first thing in the morning, before I sit down with the Tribune, I drink my first couple of cups of coffee with those papers, mostly to read the obituaries so I don’t send an e-mail to someone who died yesterday, but also because they are generally good papers, with good reporters, like Tasha Carvell, April Baumgarten, Mike McFeely, Patrick Springer, and Brad Dokken, and because they carry stories written by North Dakota Monitor reporters like Amy Dalrymple (once The Tribune editor, and a really, really good one—the paper hasn’t been the same since she left), and her excellent news team, Jeff Beach, Jacob Orledge, Michael Achterling, and Mary Steurer.)

Okay, I digressed again. Forgive me, I am a news junkie, an old former newspaper editor, and I just love newspapers. And editors. And reporters.

I want to share with you today one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a newspaper. Seriously. It is THAT funny. It’s a letter to the editor in today’s Forum, written by someone I’ve never heard of, but who appears to be a regular “letter to the editor” writer, from up by Minot, named Andrew Allis.

If you have a Forum Communications subscription (or maybe you don’t need one for this—not sure), you can click here and read it. If not, I’ve copied it and pasted it in here. I don’t think my friends at The Forum will mind—it’s free publicity for them.

The guy’s an English Major, I think, because, grammatically, he’s a really good writer. But beyond that, he loses me philosophically in the first couple of paragraphs, I think intentionally, because he wants me to keep reading. He has me believing he’s a born-again right winger, but then he kind of gives himself away at the end. I’m still not completely sure where he’s coming from. Somebody help me out. (I think a couple of my sisters might have called him, at first reading, a “male chauvinist pig.”)

But don’t stop reading after the letter. Because the comments are a hoot as well. All of them, but especially the last one. Here’s my copy of the letter, but it’s easier to read if you click on the link and can get through the paywall. The Forum’s headline over the whole thing is “Men sin, and women are awesome.” The Forum’s editorial page editor got right in the swing of things.

The Forum, November 25, 2025

Letter: Men sin and women are awesome

Opinion by Andrew Allis

There is a huge area of neglect and compromise taking place in supposedly Bible-believing “Evangelical” churches, both locally and across the nation. Enculturated (i.e. worldly) pastors and elders, saturated in the spirit of the age (e.g. feminism and Marxist CRT victimology), whether aware of it or not, irresponsibly and negligently refuse to hold women accountable for their sin while they consistently beat up on the men under their pastoral “care.”

They do this, if not out of ignorance because they are unenlightened products of their godless culture, out of cowardice, knowing that when they go after the men in the church they will usually receive little, if any, pushback. Instead, most will hang their heads in shame, men now being themselves thoroughly indoctrinated and trained in the lie that they are inherently more evil than women, and that they are the problem, both in the church and larger society.

However, if church leadership ever equally attempted to call out specific sins of women (how about the murder of their own unborn children for starters, or unbiblically, so sinfully, and routinely sexually depriving their husbands, unbridled gossip, using flirtation and their bodies for power and advantage over men other than even their husbands, and lustful indulgence in the reading of romance novels), there would be incredible wrath and a taste of hell to pay that would come down on them to the point of jeopardizing their pastoral employment and elder status. They would not only catch it from the women in the church, but also from some of the men, the “white knights in shining armour” who would undiscerningly rush to their (“the damsels in distress”) rescue.

The greatest victims of this cowardly Evangelical (more appropriately named evanjellyfish) ecclesiastical neglect is, of course, Christian women themselves who, not given the opportunity to be made aware of and confronted with their sin, are therefore unduly denied the chance to repent and turn from it.

For the good of all who claim to adhere to biblical Christianity, and for the greater clueless society, it is time for the leadership of supposedly conservative churches to stop ignoring, protecting, and consequently aiding and abetting, women’s sin. The cost to everyone is way too high.

Andrew Allis lives in Granville, N.D.  

Conversation

CHARLES OLSON

Wow. You must be one of Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian Bachelor Farmers.

MIKE ROSS

“Evanjellyfish” good one Andrew. Despite what the New Testament teaches, most woke churches don’t affirm male leadership. Instead they join the world in attacking men as leaders in their home, society at large, as well as the local church.

BRAD MILLS

(Reply to MIKE ROSS)

100% false.

BRAD MILLS

This is straight out of the Dark Ages. Well done, Granville Andy!

SHERI MCMAHON

Guess his wife left him, huh?

MARK A COOPER

The only thing that made this only a 99% waste of time is the term “evanjellyfish”.

MIKE RACHOW

Reply to MARK A COOPER

Agreed. That was a good line.

MARK REDDIG

Andy, if you’re married or otherwise sharing living arrangements with some fair damsel, I would hope your man cave has heat and other survival necessities as you’ll be there a while. Richly deserved I might add.

LINDA SCHUMACHER

Hey, Andy! I can’t imagine why you would print a letter like this, it is bad enough that you think it. But get help.

MIKE RACHOW

This article has to be some kind of a joke or maybe a “put-on.” He is criticizing evangelicals? Women need to be chastised for reading books? Very odd.

However, if he really is being serious, there is one possible reason for the over-the-top harsh tone of the article: He is upset over the “chickification” of our society. At least, that’s how Rush Limbaugh phrased it, back in his day.

That nickname was used to describe how society has changed. Women “rule the roost” now, and men are no longer the bosses anymore of their own families, like they ever were, right guys? Women have always had the power.

Maybe he’s upset that women, a previously “oppressed” group, have turned the tables on their male oppressors, and are now the ones doing the oppressing. Maybe he’s upset that women “can do no wrong,” and men are always wrong, even when they are walking alone, out in the woods, as the old joke goes.

The writer would not be wrong about any of that. The denigration of men as role models has been going on for years. You are more likely to hear in a classroom the discussion of all men as predators, rather than men being the responsible heads of the family, as they so often are.

BRAD MILLS

Reply to MIKE RACHOW

Dude, if you have to parse this apart and analyze it, you have lost the plot. This is straight out of the Dark Ages. And by the way, I have read numerous letters from this guy in the Minot Daily, and this is par for the course for him.

MIKE RACHOW

Reply to BRAD MILLS

I can see that having that context, of reading other stuff from the guy, would help to understand this letter. Unlike Rob Port, who lives there, I don’t have any particular fascination with the political activities, around Minot, ND, to pay much attention. Based on this article, though, maybe he is “out there.”

BRAD MILLS

Reply to MIKE RACHOW

Minot is “special”. They produce intellectual giants like “Ole Larson” and “Rep Van Winkle” and send them to the state legislature.

LAWRENCE SCHWARTZ

Still trying to connect the dots between Marxism, victimization, and cathode ray tubes. Somebody needs a cold compress and a dark room.

Willis Mallard

“unbiblically, so sinfully, and routinely [redacted]ually depriving their husbands.”

No wonder she said “no”

BRUCE EMERSON

That’s a lot of words just to announce to the world that one isn’t getting laid.

And that, dear readers, is what made the sun shine in my life this morning. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.