It’s not the first time an opinion piece from a U.S. senator has caused a stir. Four years ago during the height of the George Floyd riots, Sen. Tom Cotton penned a piece in The New York Times calling on the nation to restore order by sending in the troops. After causing a revolt among Times staff and criticism from readers, the paper issued a lengthy editor’s note concluding that they never should have published it in the first place. But they did leave the piece up, noting that “the basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate.”
While despicable, the Gannett-owned USA Today Network may have the Times beat.
On May 11, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) ran a column with The Shreveport Times and seven other USA Today publications in Louisiana on protecting women’s sports from biological males. But days later, it was quietly removed. Instead of issuing an editor’s note, as was the case with the Times, readers were simply given a “404” error message.
When pressed, Kennedy’s office was told the op-ed, which was later picked up by National Review, was taken down over “loaded language” and the use of the phrase “biological male.”
Many fair-minded people reject the idea that women and girls who work hard to develop their athletic talents must sacrifice their opportunities, privacy, and safety to promote gender activism. I’m one of them.
Louisiana is full of fair-minded people. We recognize that it’s common sense for boys and girls to compete in separate leagues. That’s why a bipartisan coalition in the Louisiana legislature passed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act to prevent biological boys from competing against biological girls in our elementary and high schools and from sharing their locker rooms.
Protecting women and girls in sports doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Congress should follow Louisiana’s leadership and do more to protect girls, their sports, their scholarships, and their futures from a social experiment that is already proving to be unwise. (National Review)
“[The] USA Today Network apparently does not like the way I express myself,” the senator told Fox News in a statement. “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 media is not going to win that trust back until they return to neutrality instead of advocacy. Most people don’t support allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports because they think that will bastardize sports, skew the results, and hurt women. Other people disagree. Gannett should simply report the two sides and not try to silence the position it disagrees with.”
