By Chris Powell
Having thought itself virtuous for exonerating the residents of the Connecticut colony who were mistaken for witches and hanged 400 years ago, and being confident that a state budget will be devised any day now, the General Assembly turned to another urgent issue: Whether state government forms that require people to identify themselves should provide a gender option apart from male or female: “non-binary.”
State agencies may be directed to study the implications of this and report back.
But at least one legislator, state Rep. Tim Ackert, R-Coventry, saw beyond the political correctness of the proposal, which aims to establish that biology is just an attitude and that mere wishing makes things so. The bigger issue, Ackert recognized, is the relevance, if any, of gender as a point of identification in the first place.
After all, when has any government official demanded to inspect people’s private parts as a condition of their application to get something?
Indeed, thousands of gender impersonators already may have fooled state government on one application form or another.
Gender may be relevant only in adjudicating participation in separate-sex sports competitions, access to single-sex washrooms, and placement in prison.
Indeed, is any study needed here at all? Why not just remove gender from government forms or make gender reporting optional? Apart from sports, toilets, and prison, the best response to the gender dysphoria and sexual neurosis sweeping the country may be good old libertarian indifference.
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Now that the “sanctuary city” of New York has been overwhelmed with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and nominal refugees who have crashed into the country under the Biden administration’s policy of open borders, the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class is becoming more obvious.
To house migrants, New York City government is reported to be renovating the former Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, steps from Grand Central Station, where rooms used to go for $300 per day. The migrants will reside there for free and soon may get work permits from the federal government.
Democrats and open-borders advocates may not see what this will do to the wage base in the city and especially in Manhattan, but the local working class will see it.
With housing in such a prime location gifted to the migrants by the government — housing worth $300 a day, $2,100 a week, and $9,000 per month — the migrants will be able to afford working for wages far below what the local working class requires as it drags itself back and forth on the bus or subway from the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or New Jersey. With a lower wage base, the local working class will have to work even harder to pay its own rent. No free housing for them.
Even before the Biden administration opened the borders, the United States had nearly the most liberal immigration policy in the world. Immigration is great when it can be assimilated economically and culturally, but the Biden policy of uncontrolled immigration is essentially treason.
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WORK MIGHT EDUCATE BEST: To address labor shortages, several states are moving to let children work in more dangerous jobs, to work longer hours on school nights, and even to work in bars. While at first this seems appallingly retrograde, it might not be.
For as American education has sunk under the weight of social promotion, most students — even most in Connecticut — now fail in school, performing far below grade level. They know that to advance from grade to grade and get a high school diploma, they needn’t learn anything or even come to school at all.
When formal education becomes mere pretense like this, children might learn more by going directly to the workplace. Some might end up apprenticing in jobs that can lead to decent careers. Even those who didn’t and got stuck in menial work for the long term might learn the value of the formal education they and their parents (if they had parents) didn’t take seriously, education meant to lead beyond menial work.
If they were lucky, when menial work wore them out and impoverished them, adult education would still be available.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@Cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 