DISCRIMINATION: Letters policy troubling

The Coeur d’Alene Press’s new policy on Letters to the Editor troubles me. Our First Amendment enshrines both freedom of the press and freedom of speech. One is supposed to reinforce the other. Now, free expression is to be scrubbed of “discrimination.”

There is no objective standard describing what constitutes discriminatory speech. Political speech is by its very nature offensive to some. Yet, this new policy reads like a Woke Campus Speech Code.

To me, and to global human cultures for tens of thousands of years, biological sex determines one’s role in society. “Gender” is a mere post-modernist deconstruction of biological sex. It confuses what has been clearly understood by humans about what defined a human being since the Old Stone Age.

Like all post-modernism, its intent is to damage popular understanding of those shared convictions upon which all human civilization is built, particularly our Western Civilization. This is to serve a Revolutionary goal; the construction of a communitarian “utopia” built on the ruins of the West.

While I believe that adult homosexuality should be tolerated by our society’s mainstream, I also believe that erasing heterosexuality as our cultural default setting is destructive. Already, feminist ideas have damaged the healthy development of boys by teaching that aggression must be suppressed rather than channeled. Now, a fear of excessive heteronormativity threatens to steal the innocence of pre-sexual children and sow politicized confusion among already confused adolescents.

Ideas like these are, indeed, controversial. They reveal that we are not all agreed about some very basic things. Suppressing the expression of such ideas will not eliminate the controversy. It might, however, betray the fundamental purpose of a free press.

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene