The Denver Post Has a Personnel Problem
If the opinion pages of the Denver Post cannot be used to present and discuss the views of people in Denver, then what, exactly, is the point of those pages?The Denver Post has fired the wrong person. It should can its incompetent opinion editor, Megan Schrader.
The story (told by our Madeleine Kearns here) is this: Jon Caldara of the Denver-based Independence Institute had long written a weekly column for the Denver Post, but was fired over taking an objectionable view on a trans issue — an issue of transparency. In a column arguing for greater openness in public affairs, he excoriated the Colorado legislature for avoiding the legally required referendum on a new state tax by repackaging it as a “fee” — and then prohibiting hospitals from listing the fee on patients’ bills. On the same theme, he criticized the state’s educational authorities for imposing a speech code forbidding speech considered “stigmatizing” by the self-appointed tribunes of the various sexual tribes. “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he wrote, “just about everything is stigmatizing to the easily triggered, perpetually offended.” Continuing on his theme of transparency, he also complained that the schools were not doing enough to make parents aware of the contents of their curricula.
And so Megan Schrader of the Denver Post gave Jon Caldara the shoe.
The alleged newspaper published a note in which it affirmed with po-faced sincerity that it wishes to cover a “variety of subjects and feature a variety of voices, even when some of our readers find them offensive,” which is a transparent and obvious lie, as is the subsequent disclaimer: “We believe it is both possible and desirable to write about sensitive subjects and about people with whom one disagrees using respectful language.” The Caldara column can be read in full here. The language is entirely unobjectionable. Caldara was not fired for using a slur — he was fired for affirming his belief that H. sap. is an animal that comes in two sexes.
