A spate of news stories this week, broadcast and in print, painted an ugly picture of Newtown. Headlines reported “Church urging holy war has branch in Newtown,” and “White-supremacy group may have Newtown tie.” Meanwhile, television and radio stations were echoing each other repeatedly with reports thin on substance and rather rich in implication that something sinister was going on under the peaceful facade of Newtown.

We started to get calls at our office from concerned citizens, asking if it is really true that white supremacists were using Newtown as a base of operations. One man said he had been thinking of moving his family to Newtown and wanted to know if it was still safe to do so. All this talk was rather alarming. We felt an impulse ourselves to look out the window just to make sure goose-stepping hoards of fascists weren’t marching down Church Hill Road.

We prefer to get our news about Newtown by talking to people face to face. After a few such conversations down at the police station and in Hawleyville, we did find out that there was a post office box in Hawleyville in the name of the World Church of the Creator, an Illinois-based racist group preaching “creativity.” The group was founded in 1987 by a neo-nazi, who in a supremely creative act committed suicide in 1996. The existence of the post office box is the sole substantiated fact on which all the news reports were based. Whoever rents the box may or may not live in Newtown and may or may not be using it to send or receive racist literature. Local police say they don’t perceive the existence of the box as a threat to public safety.

The current World Church of the Creator leader in East Peoria, Ill. explains that instead of preaching allegiance to God, “Creativity revolves around obedience to one’s duty to one’s own racial background.” An ideology that can discredit itself in one sentence like that deserves to be hidden away in a box forever.  Unfortunately, all the speculation in print and on the airwaves has given this so-called “church” leader a forum to spread his warped views farther and faster than would be possible with a thousand post office boxes.

For our part, we will leave the matter to the police and to the federal agencies that track hate groups. If these racists commit a crime, arrest them. If they dare speak lies in public, rebuke them to their faces. But we should also be resolved not to let them ride a wave of publicity that makes them seem bigger and more important than they are. They have nothing to do with Newtown, and Newtown should have nothing to do with them.