William Ames is exactly the sort of person we need to defend our freedom from.

His narrow-minded opinions and incorrect assertions reflect the sort of ignorance he believes he's combating.

As a quick example of his lack of understanding of the terms he's throwing around, he accuses 48 percent of Penn State students of being "Marxist/Leninist."

That assertion by itself is ludicrous, but if he thinks that pacifism is somehow an indicator of Marxist/Leninists, then he apparently hasn't read either Marx or Lenin, both of whom signal that it will take violent revolution to overthrow capitalism.

Perhaps more insulting than Mr. Ames's curious use of terminology is his assumption that he alone knows to whom the name Hanoi Jane refers.

From his enlightened perspective, I suppose dissension from military action that government officials later admitted were mistakes should be seen as disloyal. Mr. Ames has a lot to learn about the protest tradition of American history. The United States exists because of citizens' protests against their government that grew into a violent revolution.

That's one reason the right to free speech is included in the Bill of Rights, a document I won't assume Mr. Ames is ignorant of. The abolitionist movement grew out of disgust with an official government policy that allowed one human being to own another.

The post-WWII civil rights movement grew out of frustration and anger over the government's continued acceptance of legislated racial inequality. Mr. Ames is most likely aware that civil rights activists were labeled communists in their day and some of them were.

If Mr. Ames is so insecure with dissension from government policy, perhaps he should reread this country's Constitution to understand what the people in Gettysburg and Antietam were fighting about.