In late May, numerous online outlets reported that USA Today editors had deleted a previously published essay by Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy, titled “Is transgender inclusion more important than women’s sports?” 

The senator spoke against males who reinvent themselves as transgenders and participate in girls’ competitions.  The paper favors what Kennedy decries.

USA Today is privately owned (by Gannett) and is fully within its rights to exercise editorial discretion over what content appears in its pages.  No one has a right to be published by that or any paper.

But its editors cannot swing an axe to kill speech at odds with their prejudices and still hold the paper out as an objective vehicle that presents contrasting views.

When they discriminate according to viewpoint, as they have apparently done in this instance, they’ve proclaimed their bias for the world to see.  They now stand exposed as advocates for a disputed cause, ones unashamed at exploiting their positions (and readers’ trusts) to advance one side of the matter and squelch an opponent’s perspective.

USA Today reportedly added an advisory in place of the deleted piece.  “This content has been removed because it did not meet our editorial standards.”

Kennedy told Fox, ”They think they are the speech police.  Drunk on certainty and virtue, they think they are our moral teacher.  This attitude is why so many Americans have lost confidence in the media.”

The aggrieved senator later added: “Gannett should simply report the two sides and not try to silence the side it disagrees with.”

USA Today’s skullduggery reflects a woke fancy presently raging in progressive precincts.

Liberals once championed women’s rights and rightly deplored violence against women.  But they no longer believe those concerns to be dispositive. 

During a 2023 congressional hearing, one Republican screened a compilation video that depicted actual instances of girls physically harmed by transgender players.  Elected Democrats shrugged off the outrages as though they were no big deal. 

They have a new hobby horse to ride.

Males inflicting injuries on female athletes shown by the video included a girl smashed in her face by a volleyball powerfully hit by one male competitor.  The girl was knocked to the ground and lost teeth. 

Elsewhere, a female boxer had her features bloodied by a male combatant.  While not a father myself, I cannot imagine a loving father finding violence against young women either entertaining or acceptable in the name of ideology.

Politicians who posture as advocates of women’s welfare remain silent on this, lest their woke standing be challenged and their electoral fortunes suffer.  (Today, their sole motivating “women’s” issue is advocacy of the supposed right to murder babies.)

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was signed into law by Richard Nixon.  It originally protected women from sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that received federal funding.  And it mandated equality in academic sports.

But today’s Democrats no longer oppose abuse of women.  One illustration is their indifference to the above-mentioned video showing real-world girls’ injuries. 

Here’s another: the Biden administration carved a gash in Title IX, into which it thrust “gender identity.”  Such was not the intention of Title IX’s initial champions — indeed, “gender identity” was not even imagined in 1972 — but perpetual change is progressives’ definitional ambition.

In the essay USA Today first printed and that then vanished, Sen. Kennedy wrote: “Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons.  Yet, transgender athletes want athletic institutions to ignore these obvious differences so transgender athletes can feel included, even if it hurts biological girls in the process.”

Together with a pastor friend, Iowa’s DC Larson braved that state’s record cold last January to caucus for Donald Trump.  He is the author of Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press).  And his political blog is American Scene Magazine.

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