A libertarian columnist for the Denver Post was fired after criticizing the LGBT agenda, particularly its war on free speech.
Jon Caldara, president of the Denver-based Independence Institute, had authored a weekly column for the Post on a freelance basis since 2016. On Friday, editorial editor Megan Schrader informed him that the paper would no longer publish his column.
Caldara’s troubles seem to have begun with a January 3 column skewering the media’s leftward bias. Reviewing the latest edition of the Associated Press Stylebook, which is supposed to help writers and editors maintain consistency in their terminology, Caldara wrote, “What it actually does is cement terminology to promote political conclusions. It declares the winners and losers in political debates.”
When it comes to the matter of gender, for example, the AP says, “Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex and gender.” Caldara observed:
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.
His last column, published the same day he was let go, was a salvo against Colorado Democrats’ hypocrisy in demanding transparency from hospitals while denying it to both patients (by prohibiting hospitals from itemizing a state tax on their bills) and parents (by preventing them from learning what their kids’ schools are teaching about LGBT matters).
The law mandating that schools teach students about LGBT issues “actually makes for some pretty funny Orwellian reading,” Caldara noted. “It says nothing in the law ‘shall be interpreted to prohibit discussion of health, moral, ethical, or religious values…’ And then it goes on to proscribe exactly what must and cannot be said during those ‘discussions.’”
State Senator Bob Gardner, a Republican, introduced a bill this year to require schools to notify parents when such discussions will take place and to post the curriculum online for them to peruse. Senate President Leroy Garcia, a Democrat, sent the bill to a committee to guarantee it will never come up for a floor vote.
“Makes you wonder how proud the legislature is of their new progressive mandates if they have to keep them hidden in darkness from patients and parents,” remarked Caldara.
In a Friday Facebook post, Caldara said he’d been fired “over a difference in style.” He claimed Schrader “found my writing too insensitive. And yes, it is.”
My column is not a soft voiced, sticky sweet NPR-styled piece which employs the language now mandated by the victim-centric, identity politics driven media.
Plain talk that doesn’t conform to the newspeak law of “use only the words mandated by the perpetually offended.” So, it is labeled as “mean spirited” and banned. If conservatives and libertarians are granted a voice in the mainstream media, they must use the language of their ideological opponents.
Caldara told Denver’s Westword that Schrader “told me I was the page’s most-read columnist. But there’s now a permanently and perpetually offended class, and in order to speak, you need to use their terminology. There’s a whole lot of you-can’t-say-that-ism going on right now.”
He added that “he has no hard feelings toward” those who decided to drop his column. “I know they’re doing what they think is right,” he said. “But I think they’re blind to the hyper-political correctness that makes somebody like [President Donald] Trump possible.” Caldara thinks the media’s blatant bias is likely to get Trump reelected.
Undaunted, Caldara is looking at the bright side of his situation. “I’m a victim of PC-ness, so I get to be a part of the victim culture,” he told Westword. “It’s a win-win. Now I can be a victim, too.”
Image: designer491 via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Michael Tennant is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The New American.
