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I first encountered Roeser years ago, when I wrote about Bruce DuMont’s free-for-all radio show, “Inside Politics,” then on WBEZ. Roeser was the conservative sidekick. An accomplished curmudgeon, he was always willing to go one step farther than his liberal counterparts and (much to my disappointment) usually besting them. (The story appeared in the October 9, 1987, Reader ; colleague Robert McClory wrote up Roeser and conservative Catholicism May 6, 1988.)
His opinions are often repugnant, but he doesn’t trim them. At a panel discussion downtown, I once heard him advocate stigmatizing children born to unmarried parents. One of his fellow panelists — a woman who probably knew more young people Roeser would call bastards than he knows Quaker Oats executives — just hung her head and sighed. Few secularists would agree that his end (reducing births out of wedlock) justifies such cruel means, but that just shows how far gone we are in depravity.
