Buffalo Grove atheist Rob Sherman, who made a brief appearance in my column today, has accepted an apology by Rep. Monique Davis of Chicago. Davis, during Sherman’s testimony before a legislative body, told him he should “get out of that seat” and said it is “dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!”

The tirade gathered national attention, but mostly negative coverage of Davis. In my column, I noted that Sherman had an insensitive and borderline racist comment on his web site that read:

Now that Negroes like Representative Monique Davis have political power, it seems that they have no problem at all with discrimination, just as long as it isn’t them who are being discriminated against

Early this morning, Sherman deleted that sentence from his web site. He called me this afternoon and told me that I had taken the comment out of context. I disagreed and suggested the possibility of his explaining the deletion on his site. So far, nothing. But I do have links to both versions of the site, thanks to a Google cache: pre-deletion and post-deletion. This is a limited time offer, because Google caches update every few days.

I emailed Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who has been following this story extensively, and he responded that he has

interviewed Rob Sherman scores of times in the last 22 years and never heard him say anything even remotely racist or bigoted, which causes me to think this was simply a very inelegant, infelicitous attempt to make an argument

So perhaps the sentence is just a slip up. But I am a bit leery of any man who Googles his name often enough to find a column written about him at a college newspaper 150 miles away. (Update 4/12: Sherman apparently was not Googling his name in his pajamas, as I wrongly - and hyperbolically, I might add - suggested. In a phone call today, he said he found out about the column through Zorn. Which makes sense and is perfectly reasonable, though Zorn doesn’t seem to remember it that way. In an e-mail message yesterday, Zorn wrote that Sherman may “subscribe to “Google Alerts,” which is probably how he got wind of your column.” )

Sherman is also apparently more famous than I initially thought. He told me that I was probably “in diapers” when he started making appearances on television shows like Oprah and Crossfire.

In either case, Sherman, who is running for a seat in the Illinois House, did offer me a ride in the “Sherman-ator,” his mobile home campaigning vehicle, when I get home. And he lives pretty close, so maybe I’ll take him up on it.

In all its glory.

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