Source: https://freebeacon.com/politics/denver-post-columnist-fired-after-arguing-there-are-two-sexes/
January 20, 2020
A Denver Post columnist says he was fired after disputing the idea that there are more than two sexes.
Jon Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute, announced that he has been fired from the Post, chalking it up to "a difference in style" that his editors found "too insensitive."
"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," he said in a Facebook post. "What seemed to be the last straw for my column was my insistence that there are only two sexes and my frustration that to be inclusive of the transgendered (even that word isn’t allowed) we must lose our right to free speech."
Caldara criticized an Associated Press directive saying that sex and gender are not binary. "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," he wrote on Jan. 3. In a column two weeks later, Caldara also railed against a 2019 Colorado law that required elementary school children to be instructed in transgender ideology.
"Some parents weren’t thrilled a couple of years back when during school their little ones in Boulder Valley School District were treated to videos staring [sic] a transgender teddy bear teaching the kids how to misuse pronouns or when Colorado’s ‘Trans Community Choir' sang to kids about a transgender raven," Caldara wrote. "What are the protections for a parent who feels transgender singing groups and teddy bears with gender dysphoria might be ‘stigmatizing' for their kid?"
Caldara said that he was fired by the paper's editorial page editor, Megan Schrader, according to an interview with Westword published Monday.
"Megan 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."
In an email to the Washington Free Beacon, Schrader confirmed that she fired Caldara but declined to discuss the reason.
"I am writing a job description as we speak to fill his position," she said. "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."
The media’s progressive bias has a propaganda guide — The AP Stylebook By Jon Caldara
Source: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/03/caldara-the-medias-progressive-bias-has-a-propaganda-guide-the-ap-stylebook/January 3, 2020
At a recent wedding reception, I ran into a lady I’ve known for about 15 years. In her mid-60s she is the sweetest, most proper lady in the world. Never once have I heard a harsh word slip through her lips. When the conversation turned to the media, without prodding she simply asserted a loud, unambiguous, “(expletive) the media.”
When Trump points to the reporter pool in the back of one of his rallies and states, “They are the enemy,” he is singing to people like this. It’s one of the major reasons he became president.
It is fascinating how the built-up frustration to the main-stream media carried Trump to victory. It’s more fascinating that the media has shown absolutely no introspection into their role in the phenomenon. They really think most Americans see them as they see themselves — brave warriors of truth, not torchbearers for progressive ideology.
One only has to listen to NPR reporters and their pee-your-pants excitement at covering Trump’s impeachment to conclude they still have no idea so much of America considers them the enemy.
I have been around the media since the mid-80s as a cartoonist, columnist, talk show host, and of course through my years of political work. I love reporters. Almost universally they are engaging, caring, smart and riotously funny. And almost every one of them I have ever known feels called to journalism.
And not a single one of them recognizes how monolithically progressive the main-stream media is. Few of them will admit their profession is dominated by people with a left-of-center philosophy. And none, I mean none, see that what they pump out is serving the progressive agenda.
Talking to a reporter about how left the media is like talking to an alcoholic about his drinking. He honestly can’t see the issue and will angerly suggest you are the one with the problem.
But instead to turning to AA for an example of how to admit their problem, reporters turn to the AP, the Associated Press, to encourage it. The AP codifies reporters’ progressively loaded language with the AP Stylebook. This yearly updated, dictionary-like guide for reporters and editors is meant to make their work consistent.
What it actually does is cement terminology to promote political conclusions. It declares the winners and losers in political debates.
For reporters, it recommends avoiding terms like illegal alien: “use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person.” The AP instead suggests using terms like “undocumented.” While this is just fine with reporters, because most of them agree, it promotes a side on the immigration debate.
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.
The AP has updated its style to say that gender is no longer binary and thus declared a winner in this divisive debate. They ruled that, “Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex and gender.”
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.
The terms defined in the Stylebook take at most a phrase or short sentence to describe. “Race-related coverage” takes more than four pages to bob-and-weave through political correctness. No wonder the country can’t have a coherent conversation about race. We’re not allowed to use words.
Even with all the latitude the Stylebook gives reporters to steer left, they still consistently violate AP standards to push their views further.
The AP asserts, “Often, (race) is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone’s race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry.” If that is true, the media’s preoccupation with identity politics makes them worse than the KKK.
The AP declares “Music added to AP productions must not have an editorial effect, such as evoking sympathy.” Note to my friends on TV and at NPR: news with sound effects and music, your mainstay product, is commentary, not reporting. So just respect us enough to admit it.
The AP is so brazen as to state, “AP resists being used as a conduit for speech or images that espouse hate or spread propaganda.”
The AP is the conduit for propaganda. If they don’t own up to it and try to change it, they may help re-elect the president they loathe.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver.
Colorado Dems should let sun shine on their hospital fees and sex-ed curriculum By Jon Caldara
Source: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/17/caldara-colorado-legislature-should-let-sun-shine-on-their-mandates/?fbclid=IwAR1687yFZYvnaJlxwydYL4xTvJ_zQ2VOt1DS2PVsTKQxu6TXvREqvjDqrtoJanuary 17, 2020
Citizens want transparency in government. Special interests? Not so much.
Gov. Jared Polis was just on Colorado Public Radio promoting the next step on the road to government-run health care, his “public option” plan.
Making his case that private hospitals are “ripping off” Coloradans, he pointed to the sticker shock of hospital bills. “I’m sure if you’ve ever had an experience with a hospital, you know that they’re overcharging too because you’ve seen those bills. Even if your insurance pays for it, you’re like, thank goodness I have insurance.”
He failed to mention part of that hospital sticker shock is the hidden taxes the state puts on your hospital stay.
In 2009 the legislature passed a massive tax increase which would have surely died if brought to the people for a vote, ala our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. But by calling the hospital provider tax a “fee” they were able to place this ample tax own your hospital stay without your consent.
As if that wasn’t enough, they wrote the law so you’d get angry at the hospital instead of those elected officials who taxed you without asking first.
Get this, the law specifically forbids a hospital from listing this “fee” as a line item on your hospital bill.
So, they tax you without your permission and then make it look like the hospital is “ripping you off,” to use the governor’s words, by overcharging.
The hypocrisy is ripe given that Polis signed a “hospital transparency bill” last year touting hospitals should have to reveal the costs for their procedures.
The legislature could easily fix this and require hospitals to line item their tax on your bill. I haven’t heard a Democrat oppose the idea, but I haven’t seen a Democrat bill to fix it either.
Gossip is some Republican might try to do just that this year. If so, we’ll see if the Democrats in charge at the Capitol really want “hospital transparency” or if they just want to keep falsifying your hospital statements to fit their narrative.
Democrats don’t want transparency in hospital billing and they certainly don’t want education transparency when it comes to their mandate to convince your kid that there are more than two sexes, even if it’s against your wishes.
Among the most controversial laws that passed last year was the comprehensive human sexuality education mandate which ripped local control away from your neighborhood school board. Now if your school district wants to teach even basic sex ed, the teacher must also teach the “health needs” of LGBT individuals.
And in the anti-free-speech style that the left now embraces, the new law bans discussions that “employ gender stereotypes,” or any language the state’s new oversight board of LGBT activists consider “stigmatizing.” In case you hadn’t noticed, just about everything is stigmatizing to the easily triggered, perpetually offended.
The law actually makes for some pretty funny Orwellian reading. 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.”
It’s not a surprise that some parents might want to take their kids out of the “comprehensive human sexuality” session at school.
Some parents weren’t thrilled a couple of years back when during school their little ones in Boulder Valley School District were treated to videos staring a transgender teddy bear teaching the kids how to misuse pronouns or when Colorado’s “Trans Community Choir” sang to kids about a transgender raven.
What are the protections for a parent who feels transgender singing groups and teddy bears with gender dysphoria might be “stigmatizing” for their kid? How can a parent decide if she wants her kid in that class if the material isn’t transparent and easily accessible?
Enter Senate Bill 72 that was introduced by Sen. Bob Gardner this year. It’s a simple bit of transparency to help parents make an informed decision.
This bill doesn’t change any of the human sexuality re-education mandated last year, a half-dozen genders and all, it just requires the school district to send an email to parents notifying them when session is and requires the curriculum and lesson materials be put online for parents to examine before making a decision.
That’s it. Simple transparency to inform and empower parents.
Apparently this transparency is a threat to some powerful group’s agenda because the president of the senate, Leroy Garcia, has assigned the bill to the “kill” committee. That’s where he sends bills that are to have a quick and merciful death, guaranteeing that it will never get a full discussion on the floor of the senate.
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.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver.
