In a recent cover story, Jeffrey C. Billman wrote about Andrew McGuffin, a lawyer who was fired by the Social Security Administration’s Raleigh office in 2011 but prevailed last month in federal court after alleging that, as a veteran with PTSD, he was the victim of discrimination.
Carol Brooke responds: “At the beginning, you paint an extraordinarily negative picture of McGuffin, starting with the condemnation that ‘Andrew McGuffin was not a star employee.’ You describe him as bitter, with wounded pride. But then you acknowledge what McGuffin actually proved in court: He was not a poor performer. In fact, the Social Security office discriminated against him and applied illegal performance standards. It appears that McGuffin is, as he put it, ‘a damn good lawyer.’ So why the condemnation of McGuffin, someone who has finally been vindicated after a grueling and lengthy court battle he shouldn’t have had to fight?”
G. Ahearn offers a different take: “Can you imagine working with McGuffin? Oh yeah, he doesn’t work. That was my job for twenty-four years: pick up after the McGuffins. That’s the problem with diversity; you can’t favor special groups and still have equal opportunity.”
Last week, Leigh Tauss wrote about Raleigh’s neighborhood conservation overlay districts, which the new city council is likely to scrutinize. William A. Allen III writes: “My wife, Ruth Heuer, and I have lived in Cameron Village since 1996. I was the organizer and first president of the Cameron Village Neighborhood Association. Ruth and I vehemently opposed the proposed NCOD because we advocate for density and progressive redevelopment. We are not afraid of change. To set the record straight, the Cameron Village NCOD proponents withdrew their request because opponents like us were overwhelmingly against it. We managed to get signatures on petitions to stop it from a majority of Cameron Village property owners. That same clear-headed majority voted in the new members of the Raleigh City Council.”
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