Jon Caldara, a conservative columnist for the Denver Post, was fired after writing a column his editor didn’t like. The editor, Megan Schrader, isn’t saying why she fired Caldara or what was wrong with his column. Caldara thinks he was fired because his column disputed the notion that there are more than two sexes. He also says Schrader told him he was the paper’s most read columnist.
Here is the column. It isn’t really about the number of sexes.
Caldara argues that most Americans see the media as “torchbearers for progressive ideology.” He points to the Associated Press Stylebook that “codifies reporters’ progressively loaded language” and “cement[s] terminology to promote political conclusions,” thereby “declar[ing] the winners and losers in political debates.”
Stating what many conservatives strongly believe, and what most liberals probably understand, Caldara observes:
The first rule in winning any political battle is winning the language used to define the issue. In this, the media plays judge and jury.
One of Caldara’s grievances with the AP Stylebook — but not the only one — is its insistence that gender is not binary and its declaration that “not all people fall under one of two categories for sex and gender.” Caldara responds:
It’s admirable that reporters want to be compassionate to transgender individuals and those transitioning, as we all should be. But AP reporters first have a duty to the truth, or so they say. There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome. That is the very definition of binary. The AP ruling it isn’t so doesn’t change science. It’s a premeditative attempt to change culture and policy. It’s activism.
The AP, once the guardian of grammar and proper word usage, now allows “they/them/their” as a “singular and/or gender-neutral pronoun.” So, the Associated Press is happy to change the plain grammatical meaning of words to promote an agenda. “They” is singular and up is down.
Opinion writers shouldn’t be sacked for “insensitivity,” even if it occasionally spills over into gratuitousness. But where is the gratuitousness in what Caldara wrote?
I don’t see how Caldara could forcefully have argued his view — that there are only two sexes — without writing his column essentially as he did. In fact, Caldara made it a point to say that all of us should be “compassionate to transgender individuals and those transitioning.”
If the Denver Post fired Caldara for what he wrote about the number of sexes, it has embraced the second rule of winning any political battle — silence those with whom you disagree.
The Post’s Schrader told the Washington Free Beacon:
I am writing a job description as we speak to fill his position. I hope that conservative Colorado writers will apply knowing that we value conservative voices on our pages and don’t have a litmus test for their opinions.
Unfortunately, conservative writers have no reason to believe this. Absent a satisfactory explanation for Calara’s discharge, we should conclude that the Denver Post imposes either a litmus test for which conservative opinions it will accept or a requirement that certain conservative opinions not be expressed with any real vigor.
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