Being born Catholic, it was natural that I would go to Catholic schools for grades one through 12.

When I was in the seventh grade, I remember a nun teaching the class about the difference between "ignorance" and "crass ignorance." She was, of course, talking about sin, but I eventually grew to realize that the lesson applied to many other things in life.

A few months ago in this newspaper, there was a story about a tribe in Peru that had just been discovered. These are the people who are truly ignorant of things in the world.

I have people like this in my own family. For example, my niece and her husband will watch nothing but Fox News. These people do not want to hear any opposing views to what they hear on Fox. They refer to CNN as the "Communist News Network," for example. This is crass ignorance.

A recent university study showed that people who watch Fox exclusively are less informed than those people who watch no news at all. And 62 percent of the viewing audience of Fox is Republican.

Probably the most annoying Fox-only group in my family are the "birthers." Do you have any conception of how incredibly ignorant one would have to be to honestly believe that President Obama was not born in this country?

But I figured out long ago that people like this are not really that ignorant. What they really are are closet racists.

From my perspective, I grew to believe that the folks who watch Fox are the same type as the people who followed Jim Jones down to Guyana and drank that Kool-Aid when told. In other words, it's a cult.

Will Ross

Fauquier