TOW #12

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times regarding an editorial article about the controversy in connection to Muslim women wearing traditional Hijabs and Burqas, Anne Rosselot strategically lists her credibility to support her point. The New York Times published the letter on its website due to its interesting points about people who disapprove of the custom of wearing the concealing articles of clothing. Rosselot’s purpose in writing and subsequently sending the message was to express her dismay and show the impracticality of how she is labelled as a bigot for wishing that people refrained from hiding their faces. In order to show her ethos as someone who is, in any other sense, not at all bigoted, Anne Rosselot listed her ethos as a liberal. She said, “I am a woman, a feminist, a Democrat, an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter, the proud mother of a lesbian, a progressive Christian, a supporter of civil rights, a believer that Black Lives Matter, and a welcomer of refugees and other immigrants.” (Rosselot 1). These descriptors of Rosselot show the reader how she is not a bigot, because these are all feelings and actions opposite to those felt and taken by dictionary definition bigots. By listing all of the many reasons why Anne Rosselot believes she is not a bigot, she shows how insane it is that just because she worries about the security risks that emanate from women wearing the headscarves. She thus builds credibility of her statement about how she is personally not a bigot in order to support her claim that people who disagree with one liberal ideal should not immediately be cast out as conservatives or rudely called bigots. I believe that this use of rhetoric was incredibly supportive of the author’s thesis and effectively helped her convince the reader of her point.