Category Archives: Political Correctness

Jim Splaine| Columnist

Portsmouth is a beautiful, incredible, fabulous, unique, fantastic, amazing city.OK, enough words.Some newcomers of the past 20 or 30 years like to say they made it what it is today, but what our community is today comes from the contributions of the "collective 'we'" of the past 400 years.

I suspect thereisacelebration of that next year.

Sometimes unnoticed, one of our special assets is our ever-growing diversity of people and their backgrounds.As this past week's naturalization ceremony at Strawbery Bankereminded us, if we were all the same, Portsmouth would be so boring.

One of my favorite city councilors, John Hynes, who knew a lot about economicsand the value of population and opportunity diversity with his professional business development background, would often call Portsmouth a "world-class city."

He named Portsmouth that for a number of reasons.Through the years, that diversity has also included income, and therein lies the message of this commentary.There are indeed two Portsmouths:the rather well-to-do, and the not-quite so.

More: Splaine: Courageous local legislators led fight for gun safety 20, 30 years ago

That doesn't mean we're divided as a population.It just means that for some, Portsmouth has a lot of opportunities to "buy" things whether they be good housing, going to restaurants often, attending lots of ticketed music and theater events, or enjoying many of the other benefits of a world-class city.

And it means for others who cannot afford quite so good housing, or eating out at restaurants or attending the non-free activities of our community, they have to look for other ways to enjoy their days and nights.

A lot of people fall into that second category.They may be some of our retired citizens who live on fixed income.They may be working at lower-pay jobs.Regardless of age, someone making $15 or $20 an hour certainly experiences life in Portsmouth much differently than a professional who may be making six figures.

And with current-day inflation, well, it's tougher.

For many of us of the lower-income scale, going to a restaurant for dinner is a luxury. Forget it if two or three kids are involved. And with utility and electric bills about to explode, we can expect it to be more difficult for a lot of people to put aside enough for a weekly night out on the town.

More: Splaine: NH State Police now have body cams.Why can't Portsmouth?

Fortunately, the "it takes a village" spirit of our city also provides a lot of free activities, so there is always something for our residents and their families that costs, literally, nothing. More on that in another column, but a walk through our vibrant downtown is free. A self-tour through the historic South End, free. We have nature trails, free. Library, free.Nearby beaches, free.Parks, free.Sitting in Market Square and enjoying the ambiance, free.Many music and theater events, free.Hundreds of ways to enjoy a summer, or winter, without spending hardly anything.

Just put down the cell phone and do it.

The "it takes a village" spirit of our community goes to how we decide to use our tax money.Beyond the concerns our government has for maintaining our sidewalks and city buildings, providing police and fire protection, and serving the needs of our business community through the planning, legal, and economic development offices, there is attention paid to the many needs of those who need help.

More: Splaine: The Portsmouth Factor highlights importance of Juneteenth

Money spent on recreation and schools, as well as for our welfare and health departments, fills the needs of the large segment of our population that cannot afford private schools, and whose children benefit from the efforts of our school and recreation departments to provide free and equality of participation for children of families of all economic levels and for our older folks too.

Our city cares.

There is more we can do.More we need to do.Let's hope Portsmouth continues to be a magnet world-class city that attracts people of wide income diversity.We need that balance.All are welcome here.

Portsmouth is a cool place to call "home."

Today's quote:"Inclusion is not a matter of political correctness.It is the key to growth." - Jesse Jackson, 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate who ran in the New Hampshire first-in-the-nation primaries.

Nexttime:In 2023 fireworks or drones?

Jim Splaine has served variously since 1969 as Portsmouth assistant mayor, Police Commission member and School Board member, as well as New Hampshire state senator and representative.He can be reached atjimsplaineportsmouth@gmail.com.

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Splaine: Two Portsmouths: The rather well-to-do, and the not-quite so - Seacoastonline.com

AN ARCHBISHOP AND SISTER FROM THE MIDDLE EAST ISSUED A STARK warning to UK Parliamentarians that Christians in the region are still suffering persecution.

At a July 5th event organized yesterday by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) for the 2022 International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion and Belief, Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, and Sister Annie Demerjian of Aleppo, Syria, described the precarious position of Christians in the region.

Archbishop Warda said: There are still people being persecuted because of their faith and thankfully ACN didnt accept the political correctness and said, Yes, Christians are being persecuted.

The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop went on to thank ACN for the schools the organization has helped build, saying that investment in education for Iraqi Christians has helped fight the genocide undertaken by ISIS. If our children lose their schools, thats the genocide, wiping out the past, the present and the future. So, we hold to the future. Thank you to ACN for being the voice for the persecuted Christians, he said.

Sister Annie, who has ministered to suffering Christians in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011, said that the faithful are now struggling more than during the war.

She said: Now the situation is worse than during the time of war and as our nuncio Cardinal Zenari said, 90 percent of the population is under the poverty line. We are headed for a humanitarian disaster and yet the world is not listening and is not hearing. The media is not hearing about Syria, it is not interested anymore.

Sister Annie went on to describe a traumatic incident that affected her family: One day a bomb fell near the house of my brother. After a while, my niece went to see what was happening and was shocked to see her father without his head. From the shock she couldnt talk anymore. My niece later said to her mum, Mum, will they put an artificial head on like they do for legs and hands? For me this is a persecution, when we take the childhood of our children.

Also speaking was Bishop William Kenney, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Birmingham, who placed the persecution of Christians in a wider context of violence. Pope Francis thinks World War Three has already happened, but it has been happening in lots of different places. There are over 40 major conflicts in the world, he said.

Fionn Shiner

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'Christian persecution never ended in Middle East - Aid to the Church in Need

The date 1619 does not appear in the introduction to African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischers encyclopaedic, magisterial new book. But the controversial project that takes that date as its name launched first as a special issue of The New York Times magazine in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first slaves arrived at Jamestown, fronted by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and now adapted into a bestselling book and nationwide classroom curricula is the elephant in the room as he ambitiously documents the contributions to the Republic of African Americans in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Hackett Fischer, a professor of History at Brandeis University, notes that with many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early 21st century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021. He complains of demands for political correctness on campus and laments a public discourse in which we have seen a growing disregard for truth, and a cultivated carelessness of fact and evidence. He argues that ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.

African Founders has been years in the making. My substantive work on this project had its beginning in 1955, writes Hackett Fischer, 86, in the books acknowledgments. But, with the history wars raging, it arrives in the nick of time.

To set the scene, briefly, the 1619 Project aims to reframe the countrys history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative. Since it was launched, 1619 has been rebutted and debunked by American historians of comparable or even higher standing than Hackett Fischer (a very select group). Among those who have pointed out its many distortions, lies and inaccuracies is Gordon S. Wood, perhaps Americas greatest living historian, who has said he was surprised the project could be so wrong in so many ways. When another esteemed historian, Leslie M. Harris, expressed her reservations about one of 1619s core claims that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America to a New York Times fact-checker, she was ignored.

Since publication, The New York Times has stealthily edited contentious passages while Hannah-Jones seems to spend most of her time arguing on Twitter, accusing her critics of being old white dudes who Just Dont Get It. In one swiftly deleted tweet, she appeared to revel in the idea that the violent eruptions of the summer of 2020 be called the 1619 riots. None of these problems with the 1619 Project as a work have dampened its impact on American public life.

This is the fraught landscape into which African Founders arrives. A few asides in the introduction notwithstanding, Hackett Fischers rebuttal to the vogue for deeply pessimistic history is quieter and less direct than that of many of his colleagues. But that makes it all the more persuasive. African Founders is a devastating counter-example: a thorough, compelling work free from the didacticism of both 1619 and conservative attempts to set the record straight, such as the 1776 commission launched by Donald Trump in 2020.

African Founders is a successor to Hackett Fischers most lauded work, Albions Seed. Published in 1989, it described how settlers from different parts of the British Isles imported a range of enduring folkways culture, religion, language, ethics and so on to different parts of what would become the United States: East Anglican puritans in New England, southern gentry in Virginia, Quakers from Wales and the Midlands in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish border folk in Appalachia. (The enthusiasm of the descendants of that final group for Donald Trump caused many pundits to dust off their copies of Albions Seed after 2016.) Taking the same regional approach, African Founders charts the migrations, cultures and political and social contributions of slaves, freed slaves and their descendants throughout America.

It is hard to overstate the scope of this 900-page work. Open it at random and you will find subheadings such as How African School Children In Philadelphia taught Benjamin Franklin A Lesson About Race and Diversity of African Traditions Among Afro-Texan Cowhands. Breaking up the demographic, social and political big picture are stories of many African Americans whose tireless work didnt just win freedom for themselves but helped to expand the very notion of American liberty.

Many of the most pre-eminent such heroes came from Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, foremost among them Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hackett Fischer argues that this was no coincidence. The prominence of men from the region in the founding of the United States George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being the two most obvious examples left a lasting impression on a later generation of slaves-turned-leaders: These former Chesapeake built on a regional tradition of leadership, and reached beyond it in creative ways. They learned from its strengths, corrected its weaknesses, and invented other new ways of leading from their own heritage and experience.

Hackett Fischer spotlights less well-known figures too. Juan Rodriguez, for example, was an enterprising black mulatto who became the first documented non-native settler on Manhattan: he liked the look of the island and blagged his way off a Dutch merchant ship in 1613. Rodriguez fought for his freedom, fended off an attempted enslavement, married an Indian wife, became a successful trader and a translator and go-between for the Dutch and American Indians. Several scholars have called him Manhattans first merchant.

In New England, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatly, named for the ship on which she was brought to Boston in 1761, confounded racist expectations and won praise for verse that Hackett Fischer calls a large-spirited celebration of a common spirit in all people everywhere. As well as the racism she encountered in her own time, Wheatly would later be criticised by black nationalists, who werent especially keen on her short poem On being Brought from Africa to America: Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand. Hackett Fischer notes the irony in the similarities between the black nationalist critiques and the contemporary racist criticism, including from Thomas Jefferson.

Hackett Fischer is clear that none of this should detract from the cruelty of slavery or the racist violence that followed. His book is full of terrifying detail of the lives of slaves across America, including detailed accounts of how those experiences varied over time and geography. But he understands that lingering on the horrors of slavery only get you so far in understanding Americas past.

The story told by Hackett Fischer stands in stark contrast to the demotivating, almost paralysing lesson of the 1619 Project: slavery not as Americas original sin but something hardwired into its DNA, a past that cannot be escaped. It is a dispiritingly static view of the country. Rather than displaying a curiosity at the paradox that has animated so much American history How is it, asked Dr Johnson in 1775, that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? the 1619 approach dogmatically sweeps aside everything other than the existence of slavery as minor details in the story of the United States.

African Founders, by contrast, demonstrates that there doesnt need to be a trade-off between centring the experience and stories of black Americans and an appreciation of the gift of American liberty. Indeed, the takeaway from Hackett Fischers work is that the latter cannot be achieved without the former.

What if we told a story that centred slavery and Black Americans and, well, no one read it, writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in the introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, remembering her fretting on the eve of The New York Times magazine special edition. She neednt have worried. It was an overnight sensation. Indeed, measured by impact on the public conversation, rather than merit, the 1619 Project is a more successful contemporary work of opinion journalism or pop history than any other in recent history.

African Founders, by contrast, feels like a book out of time. Inconveniently heavy and equivocal in the age of skinny provocations. Moderate in an era of extremes. But closer to the truth than the divisive works that hog the limelight.

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The antidote to America's race wars - UnHerd

As the Western world moves ever more from an industrial and service economy to a digital one. The leading figures in Big Tech gain ever greater riches, fame and influence over everyones lives. The titans of Big Tech can sometimes seem to be more interested with their pet projects than the real world. Elon Musk toys with buying Twitter, Jeff Bezos plays with his own personal rocket ships and Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world to immerse itself in the Metaverse he is building. But there is one notable exception to all this, the grown-up in the Big Tech room, a serious man for serious times: Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel first became a public figure as the co-founder of PayPal in the late 1990s, but his real story begins earlier. The key to understanding Thiel, and why he is a consequential figure, is his youth. He spent his entire university career, 1985-1992, at Stanford University. This exposed him to the ideas of political correctness and identity politics that were just beginning to be formed, but have since taken over the Western world mainstream: ideas that we now call woke. The other key fact from his youth is he was American school chess champion. As a serious chess player, he is always thinking many moves ahead. These youthful factors forged the adult Peter Thiel, who is the centre of a number of overlapping spheres of influence: technological, political and intellectual.

In the case of technology, Thiel is known as the Don of the Pay Pal Mafia. This mafia are the group of people (actually all men) who were involved in the founding of PayPal twenty years ago and have gone on to found or transform a remarkable number of other companies: LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, You Tube, Yelp and Yammer. The most famous of these people is not Thiel, but Elon Musk, who is very much the front-of-house performer, with Thiel as the impresario. As well as those he worked with, Thiel himself was the first outside investor in Facebook (as was) and only quite recently February 2022 left the Meta (as it is now) board. Thiels most significant current tech company is undoubtedly Palantir. As I have written here for TheArticle, Britain will be hearing a lot more about Palantir in the future, especially in the context of the NHS. While the key executive at Palantir is Alex Karp, the CEO, it was Thiel who convinced Karp to join Palantir in the first place.

In relation to politics, the media always mention Thiels backing for Trump in 2016 as if there were not plenty of other American billionaires who did not support Trump as the Republican candidate. Thiels role is significant because he supported Trumpism, as much as Trump himself. He is helping to reshape the Republican Party from a pro-free trade, pro-foreign intervention party, into something very different. The emerging Republican Party, while continuing the social conservatism of the 1980s, is much more protectionist, favouring stronger border controls and scepticism about foreign interventions.

Typically of Thiel, his own associates are seeking to take front line elected positions. J D Vance, who worked for one of Thiels firms, has just secured the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio. His outside shot of winning the nomination would almost certainly not have succeeded, but for Thiels donations of over $10 million to a superPAC supporting Vance. In Arizona, one of the Republican candidates seeking the Senate nomination is Blake Masters, who not only worked for Thiel, but co-wrote a book with him. Thiel, again, boosted his campaign with an initial $10 million dollar donation to a supportive superPAC. If Masters wins the nomination and he and Vance win in November, there will be two young Senators who would not hold office without Thiels support.

His last but perhaps most important in the long run sphere is intellectual. When Jordan Peterson became a global intellectual superstar in 2018, on the back of his book 12 Rules for Life and the associated media appearances, he also became the leading figure in what became known as the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The IDW is a group of thinkers, YouTube personalities and journalists that challenged the increasingly Woke narrative of mainstream media and culture. It was not Peterson, however, who coined the term IDW, but Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein is a public intellectual, physicist, but also an employee of Peter Thiel. Thiels connection to Weinstein has led some of the dimmer parts of the left-wing media to denounce the IDW as a far right conspiracy. Anyone who has ever heard Eric Weinstein speak will know how ridiculous that is. The fact Weinstein is clearly a member of what used to be thought of as the mainstream Left shows Thiels embrace of different intellectual influences. The true impact of IDW will only be felt in the next twenty years, as those influenced by its podcasts, ideas and books filter into the wider culture.

The scale of the intersecting spheres of Thiels influence on American culture is difficult to overestimate. It is American culture that sets the tone for the rest of the Western world: just look at the international coverage of the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court. This why Peter Thiel, his ideas and his associates are going to be influencing the world for decades to come.

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Peter Thiel: the grown-up in the Big Tech room - TheArticle

DISTURBED singer David Draiman says that he "couldn't be more proud" of his bandmate Dan Donegan for taking on "cancel culture" with his new guitar.

Earlier today (Wednesday, July 6),Donegan, who frequently shares posts on his personal Facebook page that amplify Republican talking points and that are derogatory to Democrats, posted a couple of pictures of his new guitar from Schecter Guitars, featuring the words "Fuck Cancel Culture" incorporated into a design that replicates the iconic typography of the Coca-Cola logo.

"The new addition to my arsenal!" Dan captioned his post. "Thank you Marc LaCorte Matt Chewy Dezynski Schecter Guitars #FuckCancelCulture Disturbed".

A short time later, Draiman took to his Twitter to share a picture of the guitar, and he wrote in an accompanying message: "@DanDoneganGtr 's new guitar. I couldn't be more proud @Disturbed".

Cancel culture is the idea that someone, usually a celebrity or a public figure, whose ideas or comments are considered offensive should be boycotted. These people are ostracized and shunned by former friends, followers and supporters alike, leading to declines in any careers and fanbase the individual may have at any given time.

While "cancel culture" may be a recent phenomenon, public scapegoating, shaming and silencing tactics are not. Republicans have for a long time used the phrase "cancel culture" to criticize the left, even though there's a long list of supposedly left-leaning associates who have been targeted or boycotted by conservatives, including Colin Kaepernick, Disney, Nike, Campbell's Soup, THE DIXIE CHICKS and Kathy Griffin.

Draiman and Donegan are not the first rock musicians to speak out against cancel culture. Last month, KISS frontman Paul Stanley tweeted: "I find myself thinking 'Cancel Culture' is more dangerous than what it wants to cancel. Is censorship and silencing people okay if you believe you're right?? That is a slope we're already slipping down. You defeat lies with truth, not gags."

Stanley and his KISS bandmate Gene Simmons previously spoke out against cancel culture while answering questions from fans at a KISS VIP exclusive soundcheck event in September 2021 in Austin, Texas. At the time, they defended actress Gina Carano after she was ousted from "The Mandalorian" over controversial social media posts.

Carano a former MMA fighter who played Cara Dune in the hit Disney+ show was dropped in February 2021 over a post that likened being a conservative in modern America to being a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Simmons and Stanley, who are both Jewish, were asked if they were fans of the breakout series. Gene called "The Mandalorian" "one of the best shows on TV" and said in reference to Carano: "They should have kept the chick, even though she had different political [views]. It's not about politics; it's about whether you're a good actress."

A couple of minutes later, Paul also weighed in on the topic, saying: "Look, political views This whole cancel culture is so dangerous. The idea that people can't speak their mind. That's what freedom is all about. And to lose your job because you've got something to say even if I find it offensive that's... we've gotta look at that. Plus she can kick my ass."

In April 2021, TWISTED SISTER singer Dee Snider, who was famously called to testify before the U.S. Senate against the proposition to have warning labels be placed on albums deemed "offensive" to listeners, said that "censorship has changed quite a bit" over the last few decades. "Now censorship still exists, but it's gone from the right more to the left," he told NewsNation's "Banfield". "We're in this P.C. world where we have to be careful about what we say and who we offend, and it's a very odd thing."

That same month, Snider's TWISTED SISTER bandmate Jay Jay French addressed the fact that the current trend of canceling people and companies has gotten out of hand during an interview with Rocking With Jam Man. Speaking about the fact that Marilyn Manson was accused by several women of abuse and assault, including "Westworld" actress Evan Rachel Wood, who claimed in a social media post that Manson "groomed" and "horrifically" abused her for years, the guitarist said: "Michael Jackson got accused of some pretty bad stuff, but Michael Jackson music is still being played. So, obviously, somebody decided that that was okay; someone decided that's not gonna bother people. And yet other people's music has been taken off. [Former pop star] Gary Glitter played in all the arenas around the country baseball stadiums, football stadiums, everything. But then Gary Glitter got arrested for some weird stuff he did in Thailand with underage children and got banned everywhere. When I say 'banned,' I just mean the people said, 'We're not gonna play his music anywhere,' so they don't play his music. And I am in no way endorsing in any manner, way, shape or form his actions. What I'm saying is that that is a byproduct of what happens in life in general. And it's terrible."

He continued: "Cancel culture is not a healthy thing. Cancel culture is not healthy, because it just depends on who decides to do the canceling. So if they like TWISTED SISTER, we don't get canceled, we are okay, but if they hate TWISTED SISTER and they cancel us, it's not okay, so therefore it's not okay just to do it randomly. It's a personal choice. If you don't wanna buy something by somebody, don't buy it, but for the media to withhold it is opening up a can of worms that is almost impossible to put back in the jar."

Dee previously spoke about political correctness in 2020 when he told Canada's The Metal Voice that a movie like "Blazing Saddles", the 1974 American satirical Western black comedy film directed by Mel Brooks "could not be made today it literally could not be made, because it would offend too many people."

Originally posted here:

DISTURBED Frontman 'Couldn't Be More Proud' Of His Bandmate For Taking On 'Cancel Culture' With New Guitar - BLABBERMOUTH.NET

The late Senator John McCains widow, Cindy McCain, claimed that her late husband wouldnt approve of the Republican Party as it is today.

Prior to Thursdays White House ceremony, when Senator John McCain will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the countrys highest civilian honour, posthumously, she spoke with MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell.

Cindy McCain declared that her husband, a seasoned Republican senator from Arizona, will fight like the dickens to unify the party.

I dont think my spouse would be able to tell, she remarked. I do know one thing, he would be fighting like the dickens to pull it back together and restore it to what it was throughout past Republican administrations and earlier administrations as well, the speaker said.

Her remarks come amid a partisan debate among Republicans, much of which focused on what part Donald Trump ought to play.

As Joe Bidens ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and someone who supported him in the 2020 presidential run, Cindy McCain declared herself to be a Republican.

I remain a Republican. I support the party and what we stand for, but at the moment we arent sure where we are going. And so, as the years pass, Im hoping that maybe we can turn things around and do what Republicans do best, which is strive for smaller government while working in a bipartisan way, she said.

John McCain, who passed away in 2018 from brain illness, was renowned for his maverick persona and frequent defiance of his party, including his decisive action to save Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act.

Joe Biden, who delivered one of the eulogies at his Arizona funeral, was a close friend of him.

He was also a frequent critic of Donald Trump, who was not given permission to attend his state funeral in Washington, D.C. McCains capture by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War had drawn criticism from Trump. McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war.

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump famously remarked about McCain, I admire guys who werent kidnapped.

On Thursday, Cindy McCain will attend the Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House.

She also praised Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been under fire from Trump for supporting his second amendment and serving on the committee looking into the January 6th uprising.

Cindy McCain described Cheney as wonderful and claimed to have spoken with her frequently.

She described the other individual as an amazing lady, adding, I have chatted with her both on the phone and over email, et cetera, during this time.

She commended Cheney for putting the needs of the nation before political correctness. Trump is actively campaigning against Cheney and supporting Harriet Hageman, who is Cheneys opponent in the GOP primary.

Cheneys actions, McCain acknowledged, might cost her her position in Congress. In polls, she is lagging behind Hagement.

I simply believe that her strength and her capacity to see beyond the here and now and consider what is best for the nation, and it may ultimately cost her, her political aspirations.

She remarked, But she can go to bed at night knowing that she made the correct decision.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 individuals, including actor Denzel Washington and gymnast Simone Biles, in addition to John McCain.

According to the White House, the award is given to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, to international peace, or to other significant societal public or private undertakings.

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The late Senator John McCains widow, Cindy McCain, claimed that her late husband wouldnt approve of the Republican Party as it is today - TDPel Media

OVER the Independence Day weekend the Biden Administration shifted its blame for rising prices, and specifically rising prices of gasoline, from Vladimir Putin to gasoline retailers. On Saturday, July 2nd at noon, President Bidens Twitter account inveighed:

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost youre paying for the product. And do it now.

On July 1, 2022, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $5.34 per gallon. Thats down from the high of $5.47 per gallon hit two weeks ago, but still a historically elevated level. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, gasoline futures prices are up 57% in 2022. Diesel recently topped $5.75 per gallon and now sits at $5.73 per gallon, its highest price in decades.

The largest factor input for both gasoline and diesel is the price of oil, which has eased back some over the last month. The major reason for the price declines in both oil and products derived from oil are a mounting accumulation of economic data suggesting that an anticipated recession may already be here. (The first calculation of the second quarter U.S. GDP number will be released on July 28th.) But even despite the recent price declines, West Texas Intermediate remains up over 37% in 2022, Brent Crude up 38%.

Both misinformation and disinformation are essential skills in politics, but under the pressure of rising inflation and slowing economic growth the current administration has expanded the practice to new frontiers. The tweet, which was undoubtedly not written by the President but to which he has lent his name, begins with a salvo directed at the companies running gas stations.

In fact, of an estimated 145,000 fueling stations across the United States, less than 5% (7,250) are owned by refiners who would be, as the President says, setting prices. But even that small number of gas stations are not ultimately setting the price of gasoline. The prices first derived on world oil markets, a major contributor to which are decisions of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, are the major factor.

Further, more than 60% of retail stations are establishments singularly owned by a family or an individual. And while the number has undoubtedly changed over the last decade, 2013 Census data reported that 61% of those stations are owned by immigrants. Thus the Democratic administration that rails daily against billionaires and big companies has taken direct aim at mom & pop stores, in so doing assaulting the newest arrivals to the United States, upon whom it is clear the left and much of the Democratic Party stake their political future.

As for the present time being one of war and global peril, how tied the interests of the United States are to either of the combatants in southeastern Europe is a matter of opinion. If indeed peril is to be avoided, adopting a far more neutral stance than that which has tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and lethal weapons being sent 5,000 miles would be a wiser approach.

But it is by admonishing gas station owners to lower their prices that what is deep-seated ignorance, profound dishonesty, or both are exposed.

In fact, even at the current prices, most gas stations earn a pittance from, or actually lose money, selling gasoline alone. According to IBISWorld, whereas the average U.S. business has a profit margin of just under 8% (7.7%), the average gas station scrapes by at less than a quarter of that: 1.4%. At $5.34 per gallon, the average national price of gasoline over the Independence Day weekend, a 1.7% profit would come to $0.09 cents a gallon.

The Hustle estimates that after overhead (labor, utilities, insurance, credit card transaction fees, and so on), a gas station owner receives on the order of five to seven cents per gallon. Even selling a few thousand gallons of gasoline per day would only generate a few hundred dollars free and clear to the owner. Franchise City estimates that $50 spent at the gas pump goes:

$30.75 to the oil company, $7.00 to refineries, $4.00 to the delivery company, $1.25 on processing and transaction fees, and finally right at the end of the chain you get $1.00. And that number can and does change, sometimes even lower, most owners suggesting an average [profit] of 1 to 3 cents net per gallon.

Meanwhile the Federal gasoline tax of $0.18 cents per gallon yields a riskless, unearned fee to Washington of 3.4% per gallon. Thats twice what risk-bearing entrepreneurs, most of whom are small business owners and a sizable portion of whom are immigrants, are receiving. And this doesnt take into account state gasoline taxes, the highest five of which are found in Pennsylvania ($0.57 per gallon), California ($0.51 per gallon), Washington ($0.49 per gallon), New Jersey ($0.42 per gallon), and Illinois ($0.39 cents per gallon).

And none of this takes into account other costs and headaches which accompany gas retailing. Miniscule profits come with the costs and recordkeeping associated with environmental regulations at the local, state, and federal level. Competition tends to be fierce, with numerous locations clustering at high-volume transportation junctions. The price sensitivity of many drivers is active at differences of as little as one cent. Many stations operate 24/7 to maximize revenue. And for those which operate as franchises, in return for name recognition and some volume discounts the associated fees can be enormous. (Not only do franchisees have to pay fees to the parent company, they also have to price their product in accordance with national promotions, which can undercut profitability.)

The awful business economics of gas station ownership are, in fact, why large oil firms and refiners are not interested in it. And it is why theyve reduced their exposure to the consumer-facing end of the energy sector over several decades. Unsurprisingly it is lousy financial prospects that have pushed fueling stations into retailing food, drinks, cigarettes, toiletries, and a wide variety of other goods travelers may want or need. All of those goods have appreciably higher profit margins than retail gasoline sales, and for many independent, single owner-operated service stations are the key to their very survival.

So why do so many immigrants choose a business with seemingly dismal financial prospects? Trisha Gopal explored that question in Eater a bit over a year ago. Kindly remain mindful of Bidens July 2nd tweet while reading her explanation:

As I speak to each owner, I realize the choice of a gas station is always a utilitarian one. When I ask her why they chose a gas station, Angelina Rizo gives me two answers. The first is one I hear from every restaurant owner I speak to: People need gasoline, so as long as people are driving, the more likely they are to have customers, and the more likely those customers will need something to eat. Its an explanation rooted in the same immigrant mentality Ive seen and heard my entire life: Look for opportunities, stay on your toes, and always find a way to be useful. When we wonder why immigrants are so entrepreneurial, its because so many of us are taught to first look to see where we are needed, and then, once we are there, go beyond.

There is a darker component to Bidens redirection of blame as well. It is ironic that an administration built upon an ideological commitment to political correctness and the notion that words should be selected with surgical precision would message this clumsily. Gas station owners, a business community overrepresented by new immigrants to the United States, have frequently been targets of racist and xenophobic ire. Saddling them with blame for a particularly damaging aspect of the ongoing inflation increase is, beyond wildly inaccurate, irresponsible and morally unconscionable.

No one expects government officials, especially career politicians, to understand any of this. Neither have they any incentives to take real economic, financial, and business details into their static, oversimplified missives. The image of gas station proprietors as richly compensated corporate executives at the helm of multinational corporations is one the Biden Administration has a vested interest in promoting. And there is no better measure of a political body out of ideas than an increasingly frenzied leap from scapegoat to scapegoat.

Peter C. Earle holds an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA (Finance), and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

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OPINION | Leave the gas station owners out of it - Marianas Variety News & Views

Lauren Mcgaughy| The Dallas Morning News

Dallas If Jonathan Mitchell were a comic book character, he would be drawn holding a lawbook in one hand and in the other, a sledgehammer.

Best known as the architect behind Senate Bill 8, the state law that deputizes everyday Texans as abortion bounty hunters, Mitchell has spent years arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse its decision in Roe v. Wade. His legal theories and court cases helped lay the groundwork onto which the ruling came toppling down.

But as the rest of the country was bracing for the fall of Roe, Mitchell was already moving on. Since opening up a one-man legal shop in Austin four years ago, he has jumped headlong into myriad other lawsuits over everything from the contraceptive mandate to affirmative action and same-sex marriage.

Mitchell says his goal is to systematically dismantle decades of rulings he believes depart from the language of the U.S. Constitution or that impose constitutional rights with no textual basis. With the Supreme Court moving ever more his way, the cases he brings may be a bellwether for the direction of the nations legal establishment, and, by extension, the nation itself.

In a rare interview, the former solicitor general of Texas insisted that underlying his mission is not religious belief or political ideology or personal animus, but an unflinching conviction that federal courts must interpret the Constitution closely and cannot declare new rights not explicitly afforded in that document.

Mitchell sees himself in the role of redeemer not destroyer.

For decades, the Supreme Court has been making up constitutional rights that are nowhere to be found in the language of the document, Mitchell, 45, told The Dallas Morning News. These decisions are lawless, and they need to be undermined and resisted at every turn until the Supreme Court sees fit to overrule them.

But where Mitchell sees himself as a devotee to the rule of law, his opponents detect an extremist. Regarded even by his harshest critics as an undeniably sharp legal mind, they fault him for, in their views, intentionally dismissing precedent and the real-world consequences of his actions in an effort to wipe a number of fundamental rights from the lawbooks.

When Mitchell threw his support behind Mississippis 15-week abortion ban, the case that toppled Roe, he urged the Supreme Court not to be squeamish about other rulings it might knock down.

Interracial marriage is protected under federal civil rights law even though its not specifically preserved in the Constitution, Mitchell wrote in an amicus brief co-authored by Chicago Law School chum Adam Mortara. The same could not be said for the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage, they argued.

Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas, the rulings that declared bans on gay marriage and gay sex as unconstitutional, were as lawless as the abortion rulings, they wrote. If Roe were to be overturned, Mitchell and Mortara argued, the court should not hesitate to declare that these other rulings are likewise hanging by a thread.

Last month, Clarence Thomas said just that.

In a concurring opinion supporting the decision to overturn Roe, the conservative justice called Lawrence and Obergefell demonstrably erroneous decisions with no basis in the Constitution or U.S. history. He urged his fellow justices to reconsider them.

The judicial philosophy underlying the decision to overturn Roe is called textualism, a theory of interpretation that emphasizes a plain reading of legal documents based on their text. Mitchell is a strong adherent.

If a constitutional right is not mentioned in the constitutional text, it doesnt exist, Mitchell said in a wide-reaching interview. I dont care how desirable it may seem as a matter of policy.

His core belief in textualism is underscored by a concept Mitchell coined himself called the writ of erasure fallacy. Courts, even the highest in the land, can only stop certain laws from being enforced by certain defendants, his concept dictates; they do not have the power to alter or annul them.

This means Mitchell views nearly every Supreme Court ruling as strictly temporal decisions that can be reversed if the right argument is made in front of the right set of justices. And by extension, any law that remains on the books, even if it is deemed unconstitutional by the high court, can be revived if the court changes its mind.

For example, Texas legislators have refused to remove the states bans on same-sex intimate relations and gay marriage and from the lawbooks even though theyre unenforceable. And last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that abortions should be illegal in Texas immediately because the state never repealed an abortion ban enacted in 1925. The Texas Supreme Court ordered late Friday that the ban can be enforced immediately.

Just six years ago, at the time of Antonin Scalias death, the majority of Supreme Court justices adhered to an interpretation of the Constitution that looked at it as a living document and relied more on precedent. But the court has shifted and become more receptive to textualist arguments even liberal justice Elena Kagan recently declared, were all textualists now.

This shift is one big reason Mitchell opened up shop in Texas. This is the moment, he believes, to pursue his goal of targeting decisions he considers based on improper interpretations of the Constitution. And with his experience in the state and its favorable tax laws, Austin is the place to do it.

Raised in Pennsylvania, Mitchell attended Wheaton College, which bills itself as preparing students to make an impact for Christ. He went on to study law at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with high honors.

Mortara, his law school classmate, describes his longtime friend as deeply thoughtful and moral, a man lacking even one unkind cell in his body. He insists Mitchell has been horribly mischaracterized as some kind of a Westboro Baptist guy fixated on taking away peoples rights.

He is very gentle, Mortara said. He is extremely polite and respectful to people of all backgrounds.

At Wheaton, Mitchell majored in computer science, and friends say he approaches law with the same deliberate focus one might when tinkering with a machine. They throw around words like genius and visionary and nerd. He is punctilious, they say, uncompromising when it comes to rules and conduct, and with a heightened concern for morality and codes of conduct.

By way of example, one friend offered up the way Mitchell bills his hours. Most lawyers split their time on the clock into increments of six minutes. Mitchell breaks his down even further to ensure hes not overcharging clients.

Hes a happy warrior, said Hiram Sasser, a longtime friend of Mitchells and executive general counsel of the conservative legal nonprofit First Liberty Institute. Hes a formidable ally.

After law school, Mitchell clerked for J. Michael Luttig and Scalia. He was there when the justice wrote one of his most memorable dissents to the 2003 Lawrence ruling declaring Texas ban on gay sex unconstitutional.

From 2010 to 2015, Mitchell served as Texas chief appellate lawyer under then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. He argued in front of the Supreme Court four times and defended the states laws against same-sex marriage and abortion. A member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, he later taught law at Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin.

Then-President Donald Trump nominated Mitchell to head the Administrative Conference of the United States, an agency meant to improve federal rule-making and other processes, but he was not confirmed.

In 2018, as Trump appointed his second of three justices to the high court, Mitchell opened his own firm in Austin. Its the first time hes been in private practice.

Mitchell has thrown himself headlong into the abortion fight in Texas. He helped draft city ordinances that sought to outlaw abortion at the local level and had a hand in crafting Senate Bill 8, which empowers private citizens to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion for up to $10,000.

The bill, which essentially bans abortion after about six weeks, became law in September. It was tested by the Supreme Court and allowed to stay in place.

Senate Bill 8 is now considered model legislation by other red states that may use it to deputize their citizens to enforce other conservative laws. Mitchells role in crafting the legislation catapulted him into the national spotlight.

But Mitchell hardly ever speaks to the media. He doesnt appear to have any social media presence. There are only a handful of photos of him online and he would not consent to a portrait for this story. Even when Senate Bill 8 was passed into law, he wasnt at the public signing ceremony.

Mitchell, married with children, says he does not have time for hobbies and sees no need to seek the limelight. His firm doesnt issue news releases when it files new cases or marks a win.

The payoff comes in the victory itself.

While Mitchell values his privacy, his work now appears to be everywhere.

He has his hands in cases from California to New York involving such disparate concepts as redistricting, subsidies for Black farmers and religious liberty. While there are a handful of conservative nonprofit law firms pursuing similar cases, with whom Mitchell at times works in tandem, he sees himself as stepping into a void where other private attorneys rarely dare to venture.

The big law firms wont touch this stuff. So it sometimes feels as though I have the field to myself, Mitchell said.

At least two of the roughly 50 cases he is pursuing involve same-sex marriage.

In both, Mitchell argues that government employees with the power to perform marriages in Texas should be able to recuse themselves from performing gay weddings due to religious beliefs. One of the cases, which is awaiting a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, provides a preview of how Mitchell would argue for the reversal of Obergefell.

In a brief filed in June 2020, Mitchell argued that Obergefell improperly subordinates state law to the policy preferences of unelected judges.

There is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Mitchell argued on behalf of his client, a county judge who argues that his Christian faith prohibits him from marrying gay couples. Mitchell added: The federal judiciary has no authority to recognize or invent fundamental constitutional rights.

Thats why their amicus in the abortion case that overturned Roe was purposefully provocative in part to make Mississippis arguments appear more moderate in comparison and to give the high court the fortitude to declare that these rights had no basis in the Constitution.

We wanted to show the justices that the entire edifice of court-invented rights should be rejected, because many of those rights such as the rights to contraception and interracial marriage are protected by other sources of federal law, so there is nothing to fear from repudiating the supposed constitutional basis for those rights, he said.

Despite these cases, Mitchell said he is not trying to dismantle gay marriage.

If state legislatures want to pass laws legalizing it, they can, he said. But until the Constitution is amended to include the right to same-sex marriage, he argues that the Supreme Court wrongly decided this issue and the ruling is in play.

When asked about his personal views on the matter, Mitchell said he considers the policy to be a much closer question than whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.

Im a formalist and legalist by orientation, he said. Policy decisions are for the political branches to sort out.

The problem, opponents say, is that there are real-world consequences.

The courts have long looked to reliance interests, or how people come to count on legal decisions in their everyday lives, when reconsidering rulings. Throwing these considerations out the window is not only legally impractical, it is also fundamentally foolhardy and ultimately damaging, said SMU Dedman School of Law constitutional law chair Dale Carpenter.

First of all, there are the millions of gay people who have been wed since Obergefell was decided, not to mention the children, wills and end-of-life plans affected by those unions.

Whats more, if the state revisits Obergefell and Lawrence because gay rights arent explicitly stated in the Constitution, what case is next? Contraception bans? Mandatory sterilization? Racial segregation in schools?

I dont think Americans are ready to confront those questions again in the name of a kind of dry textualism, Carpenter said. It would be a very stripped down notion of the national floor on civil rights.

What Mitchell is attempting to do is move the legal establishment and, eventually, the high court more in this direction, Carpenter added. This kind of ideological change is called shifting the Overton window, and its been a successful strategy among the far right since Trumps election.

Charles Fried, the former U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan and a leading legal thinker, dismissed lawyers of Mitchells ilk as fringe actors.

Theyre not conservatives, he said. Theyre reactionaries. They want to undo the last 100 years.

Last fall, nearly 100 fellow Chicago law graduates condemned Mitchells involvement in writing the Texas abortion law in an open letter published online.

Mitchell played down some of the fears raised by his opponents. He is not worried, for example, about states outlawing contraception if that Supreme Court case is revisited because he said that right is protected by federal law.

But Carpenter warned about this way of thinking. Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say Roe would be overturned, so why shouldnt proponents for womens and gay rights be concerned?

There might be a temptation to think of him as a jurisprudential gadfly, Carpenter said. But I do not think he can just be dismissed. Hes an intellectual force and that has to be respected.

Mitchell has partnered with groups such as the nonprofit America First Legal Foundation, headed by Trumps former hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller. Among clients, Mitchell counts Steve Hotze, a man who has compared gays to termites eating away the foundation of American moral fabric and who is known to pull out a sword at events and encourage his followers to pierce their enemies using the word of God.

Mitchell recently appeared on a podcast hosted by Tony Perkins, the head of the openly anti-LGBTQ group the Family Research Council. Perkins called Mitchells abortion strategy brilliant.

Mitchell pushed back against tying his views to those of his clients.

Everyone deserves representation. White-shoe law firms represent murderers, al-QaIda terrorists and child molesters like Jeffrey Epstein, Mitchell said. Of course, none of those law firms would represent Dr. Hotze, and they would ostracize any lawyer who does. But I dont enforce a political correctness test for the clients that I represent.

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After Roe, architect of Texas abortion law sets sights on gay marriage - Detroit News

Thank goodness the political psychodrama of the last few days is over. As the resignations from government sailed past 50 MPs, with Michael Goves sacking thrown in for good measure, a new British farce was in full flow. Carry On, Prime Minister was amusing enough. Yet beneath the comedy lie some deadly serious matters.

For all Boris Johnsons personal qualities - and faults - it is clear to me that he didnt ever really understand Brexit. Writing entertaining Eurosceptic columns in this newspaper, as he did for several years, and wanting to leave the European Union, are two very different things. He is the man who only joined the Leave campaign in 2016 at the eleventh hour, after wrestling with the issue.

The same can be said of the Conservative Party. By the time of the referendum, it had been a party of Europe for half a century.

The key question in my mind now is whether or not it is too late for the Tories to learn the lessons of the past six years and save themselves.

When the Brexit Party stormed to success in the European elections of 2019, our principal slogan was that we aimed to change politics for good. The 2016 referendum vote had been about removing the shackles of the anti-democratic EU, yes. But it was also a victory for ordinary people voting against the London-based establishment. We knew that the publics antipathy was not just aimed at individual politicians but also towards the mainstream media and the wider political class.

That sense of opposition among everyday people hardened as they saw the Westminster elites doing their best to frustrate the referendum result. A palpable hunger for a new way of doing politics emerged. The hope was that it could be more connected to real life; less detached and more responsive.

After the Tories humiliation in those European elections of 2019, they did seem to get the message that while Brexit was about leaving the EU, it also represented a chance for a new dawn to break in British politics more generally. This was encouraging.

Yet, despite producing the slogan Get Brexit Done, which was highly effective in the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party soon returned to business as usual. Johnson briefly appeared to suggest that he, too, was in favour of a new kind of politics, but there is scant evidence that he meant it.

On his watch, a new chumocracy filled up Number Ten. In addition, a group of trendy Londoners pushing their net zero agenda came to the fore - and stayed there. Indeed, apart from the legislation that allowed Britain to leave the European Union, it seems very much as though under Johnsons tenure, Britain has returned to the bad old days of the Cameron / Osborne social democracy, with barely a Conservative view to be heard.

Lets be clear: for the Tories to have squandered an 80-seat majority by introducing no significant reform of our electoral system or, indeed, of the country is genuinely shocking. Winning a fifth term will be impossible without some major changes. Frankly, even if the Tories had made some fundamental changes by now, pulling off a fifth term would still be tough. The economy is in the doldrums and the Tories have been in power since 2010. The electorate will be crying out for change next time.

If the Tories are to have a chance of staying in power, what is needed is Brexit 2.0.

Starting now, the Tories must make it clear that the UK will become self-sufficient in energy as soon as possible. They need to agree to overhaul various institutions including the House of Lords, which should be scrapped in its current form. There must be at least an element of proportionality in our voting. And the biggest change of all is that Britain must leave the European Court of Human Rights and genuinely take back control of its borders.

This kind of agenda would be able to bring together the Red Wall voters and most of the Conservative voters in the south. I would add that the Tories simply cannot lose sight of the fact that many traditional Labour voters are small c conservative in outlook, especially when it comes to social affairs. They resent having political correctness thrust upon them.

Do any of the current leadership candidates have the courage or the character to stand up for these things? Do they have the charisma needed to sell this plan to the voters? The next few weeks will tell.

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If the Tories are to have a chance of winning the next election, what is needed is Brexit 2.0 - The Telegraph

CLEVELAND -- Kiel, Wisconsin, a little town of 4,000 souls located about halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, suddenly found itself as the center of the pronoun universe a couple of months ago.

In April, the parents of three eighth-grade boys at the local middle school were informed that their sons were being investigated for sexual harassment as described, sort of, in the 1972 Title IX legislation that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school that receives federal funding.

It seems that the boys had been accused of failing to use another students chosen pronouns they/them while addressing the classmate in a music class. Back in 1972, gender pronouns were well understood and uncontroversial, but todays world has become more complicated for everyone, including eighth-grade boys.

Mispronouning, the boys sin is called.

One of the mothers, Rose Rabidoux, thought it was a joke when she got the call from a school administrator. I really thought, Youve got to be pulling my leg, she told a local news show. The more he said, No, this is for real, the angrier I got.

With some help from a Wisconsin conservative legal aid group and a lot of outrage from the local community which unfortunately escalated to bomb threats the parents succeeded in getting the school district to abandon the investigation and exonerate the students in June.

But as Rabidoux said afterward, this dispute should never have been escalated to this point. And the ardor with which the school district pursued it presents some obvious questions:

How and why did we get here? Why did we allow this to happen to our culture?

Who had the authority to twist our language out of shape in the interest of trying not to offend anyone? When did we reach the point where you can be suspended from school, disciplined at work or shamed on social media for using words that have had unambiguous meanings throughout our lives?

Its not only pronouns. On an increasing number of hospital websites, women are not women any more. They are birthing people or menstruating persons or individuals with a cervix. Or, as it says on a Cleveland Clinic website, people with the reproductive parts associated with being assigned female at birth (AFAB) including cisgender women and transgender men and nonbinary people with a cervix.

Really? We have to go through all that so that someone doesnt feel uncomfortable?

An unsuspecting woman might be told that she doesnt have breast cancer, but chest cancer, as author Patricia Posner wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The sensitive person no longer calls a mother feeding a child breast-feeding. Its chest-feeding, and the baby does not get breast milk. The child drinks human milk.

Getting back to the pronouns more and more lately, youre likely to get emails from someone with the senders preferred pronouns appended to the signoff. Youll not get this from me, but heres what it looks like: Ted Diadiun (he/him). As if you didnt know.

The Cavaliers have signed on to the program. Imagine getting an email from Austin Carr (he/him).

Go on any college campus and youre likely to see people wearing buttons that announce their preferred pronouns. If the school does not provide them, students can find them on Amazon.com with any combination of pronouns they wish and if the student is really ambivalent theres one that says, Fluid. So ask.

Ive got a friend who asked an obviously female student something about her project, and was gently corrected by a professor who said that they are working on such-and-such. My friend was momentarily puzzled, surprised to learn that it was a group project, but then realized Oh ...

The pronoun confusion has even made its way into the comics pages I had to read a June 20 Sally Forth strip more than once to make sense of it, because one person is saying, Have you seen what Riley is wearing today? Whats up with that? And Sally answers, I like their outfit. I think they had a cool style.

I thought she was talking about one person Oh

A reporter for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com gamely tried to explain it all in a Page One story during Pride Month in June.

I think you have to go back to why are we doing it, the story quoted Monica Jackson, vice president of Inclusion and Diversity for Eaton Corp. Its about respect and understanding how people want to be referred to.

We can stipulate that this all started with good-hearted people trying to do the right thing to make everyone feel cared for and included and respected. There have always been people for whom gender is complicated, and who as a result felt like outsiders.

Kindness is not a bad inclination. However people view themselves or wish to present themselves to the world, that should be OK with you, me, or anyone.

But why this need to render the language meaningless in order to cater to a tiny percentage of the population? There are plenty of other ways to offer respect, and acknowledge each others humanity.

If Fred wants to be known as she, I guess I can get used to that. It doesnt make sense to me, but it doesnt have to, does it? It wont change my life, and if it makes Fred feel better, why not?

But they? Theres only one Fred. To call Fred they is forfeiting clarity in the name of what? Perhaps its the fault of our language, which does not have a gender neutral pronoun. If people want one, perhaps it would work. At least it is singular. But if you dont like that, pick your own.

Speaking of clarity, how many people are we going to offend if we refer to someone who just gave birth as a woman? Everyone knows what that means. Do we really have to say birthing person?

For women like me, it seems as if we are incrementally being erased in a rush of political correctness to ensure no trans person is offended, wrote Posner in her op-ed. I respect trans rights, but what about my rights? There is a death of common sense playing out in real time, and most women are quiet for fear of being attacked as bigots.

If you attack someone verbally or physically for who or what they are, thats bigotry. But how is it bigotry to employ language we have used and understood all our lives, but that a minority of people suddenly want to change?

It makes me think of the timeless quote from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Everyone is entitled to their own idea of who they are, but we are indeed past the point of common sense when we can no longer agree on the simplest, most straightforward words.

Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Ted Diadiun: tdiadiun@cleveland.com

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Being respectful shouldnt have to mean upending the language: Ted Diadiun - cleveland.com