We are troubled by remarks by Lycoming County Commissioner Mark Mussina at last week’s commissioners’ meeting.

Mussina said he had heard complaints about a voter registration drive conducted by Republicans outside of Lycoming County’s courthouse. He acknowledged that the Republicans had secured the appropriate permits to hold the registration drive from the city.

Then, as he discussed the permit process, Commissioner Mussina referenced that the city, in the past, has granted permits for rallies planned by white supremacist organizations.

“It’s not what you agree with — it’s what’s allowed under the law,” Mussina said of authorities allowing either the voter registration drive recently or the white supremacist rally a few years ago.

He did not rise to the occasion to clarify that these two groups also do not agree with each other.

First, we are troubled that residents of our county are unfamiliar with the First Amendment and its protections of the right to peacefully assemble, to speak publicly and to register other members of the community to vote.

But we are also deeply troubled that Commissioner Mark Mussina, serving taxpayers in a county where Republican candidates for the presidency, governor and other offices frequently receive 65% to 70% of the county’s vote, felt it was necessary to compare our engaged, politically active Republican neighbors with a white supremacist rally held several years ago.

Our elected officials should thoughtfully and deliberatively consider whether attempting to compare Republican residents of our county, inviting civic engagement, with a group from outside our county that came to our city to stoke racial and ethnic division and promote a hateful culture rooted in rejecting American values is appropriate.

It is, of course, true that both groups enjoy the same liberties under the Bill of Rights and that both groups chose to exercise those rights — under vastly different circumstances and with vastly different motivations.

The chasm of differences in the motivations of white supremacists and of our Republican neighbors, family and friends should give any elected official — elected in a county where they must serve the interests of so many Republicans — pause before invoking one group when discussing the other.

No other commissioner or public official at that meeting felt it was necessary to bring up the white supremacist march.

It disturbs us that less than a week before what is already a contentious, exhausting election that we may have to remind an official elected to serve all the residents of our county that the tens of thousands of his Republican constituents are not neo-Nazis.