Not funny

I was shocked to read a comment by Matt Birk in Dave Hrbacek’s Feb. 23 article, “Matt Birk: Man on a Mission.” When commenting on the support of his wife Adrianna through years of his chaotic life, he jokes: “We got eight kids, it’s not like she can go anywhere. She’s trapped. That’s my joke.” It’s a misogynistic joke in very poor taste and is horrifying to hear from a man who is being held up as a role model. It’s just as horrifying that both the author of this piece and the editor chose to include it. You can do better.

Sarah Cronin
Mary, Mother of the Church, Burnsville

A ‘Driver’s Licenses for All’ counterpoint

In response to Loras Holmberg’s complaint about “Driver’s Licenses for All,” (Letters, March 9) maybe the previous law disallowing immigrants driver’s licenses had no heart. Some laws are like that.

When my son was 11 (now 32), he became friends with a family who had come here because America had flooded the Mexican corn market and their father’s corn farm couldn’t sustain them anymore. At the time, licenses were legal, but he couldn’t renew it when the law changed. He was profiled in a traffic stop and kicked out of the country. Through great personal loss he was able to get back in and be reunited with his young family, but again was arrested for driving without a legal driver’s license, and with the threat of years of imprisonment, they — we — kicked him out again, and he never spent a day with his family here again. He died 10 years later in Mexico much too young, missing his family. He will never see his new grandchild, his two boys now grown and U.S. citizens, or his dear wife. This Saturday (March 18) is the anniversary of his death. I feel the resentment in the tone of the letter. I wish for healing, for the letter writer, and for the family of my son’s friends.

Elizabeth Rosenwinkel
St. Albert the Great, Minneapolis