Chris Powell: If gender means nothing maybe age doesn’t either

— Photo by TrackCE

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Now that loony ideology is trumping biology and the country is entering an age where merely wishing or thinking is supposed to make it so, why stop with transgenderism? If boys and men can be girls and women, and vice versa, even for competitive sports and bathroom use, thereby nullifying Title IX and sexual privacy, how can age restrictions be fair anymore?

If you're really only as old as you feel, mandatory retirement ages must go. So must age group rules in sports.

If wishing or thinking makes it so, who has the right to tell any 40-year-old that he can't play on a Little League team and enjoy hitting a 12-year-old's pitches out of the park or knocking over the 13-year-old trying to tag him as he slides into third base?

For a few years Connecticut has been nervously humoring this nonsense with the rationale offered by Gov. Ned Lamont -- that it hasn't happened much, just famously in high school girls cross-country meets. This is only to say that it doesn't matter because it has happened to someone else's daughters. To object risks being called a "transphobe" or worse, though no one is denying the right of people to impersonate the other sex outside of competitive sports and bathrooms.

Similarly, people in Connecticut are being mocked or worse just for arguing that schools should not press topics like transgenderism on the youngest children.

Lacking good argument, the transgender cultists rely heavily on intimidation, because it works better. So the nonsense may not end in Connecticut until the women's basketball teams at Stanford or Tennessee recruit some 6-foot-9, 275-pound transgender forwards who leave UConn players writhing on the court with ACL tears or worse.

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MORE UNPUBLIC EDUCATION: New London High School's football coach says he has been forced to resign because of an insignificant incident during a game with Ledyard High School. According to The Day of New London, the school's athletic director refuses to explain because, he says, it's a personnel matter.

That's public education in Connecticut, again resorting to the oldest non-sequitur of government -- that there never can be any accountability with personnel, so go away. Unfortunately most people do go away.

But the law does not say that personnel matters in government cannot be reviewed and discussed in public. To the contrary, while teachers enjoy a special-interest exemption for their annual performance evaluations, the law makes public other records of school employment and particularly records involving misconduct.

A request to New London's school superintendent for access to all records involving the coach might show the public what happened with him and let the public make an informed judgment about it. If the superintendent refused that much accountability, the city's Board of Education could be appealed to, and then the state Freedom of Information Commission.

School administrators might be able to delay accountability for a year or two -- probably not forever. But stalling accountability for a year or two is usually enough for public education to avoid being public.

Public education won't really be public at all until the "personnel matter" non-sequitur is challenged whenever it is cynically trotted out.

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LET WINE JOIN BEER: Supermarkets in Connecticut have renewed their campaign to persuade the General Assembly and governor to change state law to let them to sell wine. That certainly would be a convenience. While supermarkets already are allowed to sell beer, anyone who would buy wine or liquor has to make a separate trip to a liquor store.

There is no good reason for this trouble, only a bad reason -- Connecticut's long subservience to the retailers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, accomplished through laws sharply limiting alcoholic-beverage retailing permits and prohibiting price competition, essentially turning the alcoholic beverage business into political patronage and what is called rent seeking. As a result Connecticut has unnecessarily high alcoholic-beverage prices.

Supermarkets should be allowed to sell beer, wine, and liquor just as liquor stores should be allowed to sell groceries -- that is, if government ever means to serve the public interest rather than the special interest

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).