Army Bob: Can we be jailed for using the wrong pronoun?

A headline from the Associated Press read “California criminalizes speech;” the AP story reported: “Violators of the provisions in the law could be charged with a misdemeanor, meaning that they could be fined up to $1,000 or jailed up to one year in California.”

Governor Jerry Brown, a confirmed progressive, was elated when he signed a law Oct. 6 criminalizing incorrect speech. Now to be fair, the law is narrow, and only criminalizes caregivers who have been warned to use the preferred gender pronoun for patients.

To the good folks on the liberal side, where are you hiding, the left, the progressives Americans who used to pride themselves on freedom of speech, and are now the leaders of an anti-free speech movement? This is insane; the left is celebrating jailing people for mere speech.

Any reasonable person would expect to see the media up in arms and burning up the editorial pages with protests of Fascists criminalizing free speech. The rub here is that the Fascists are the progressives in the most liberal state in the union. Free speech only works when it is a two-edged sword cutting right and left; again where are the self-appointed protectors of free speech, the media?

Health care workers who are told to refer to a person by a preferred gender and refuse should be fired, dismissed, sacked, canned, shown the door, but for God’s sake not jailed. Speech that is improper in a work place is grounds for all types of action: reprimands, demotions, reassignments, firing. But a year in a state prison has a chilling effect on our free speech rights.

The ACLU was, before the Bakke Case in which they represented a person in a reverse discrimination suit, the champion of free-speech. Bakke caused the ACLU to lose an enormous number of liberal members and funds; after Bakke they became the Progressive Americans Civil Liberties Union, only concerning themselves with the properly approved liberal issues. The ACLU is a corporation, a not for profit corporation sure enough, but it has bills and salaries to pay after all, and the bottom line is more important than free speech to any corporation.

The media, the ACLU, the colleges and universities who tell themselves they are the champions of free speech are deaf and dumb when it comes to reaction to this attack on free speech. It is because they agree with jailing Americans for politically incorrect thoughts and speech. The left has that right, but this is not merely a slippery slope it is an ice covered and vertical slope.

Very few people will ever be jailed under this law, so what harm does it do? Gender identification is an issue championed by the progressive media and the left in general, so people who use the wrong gender pronoun in referring to people should go to prison, right? Wrong, mere speech should not put an American behind bars, hurt feelings are not grounds for imprisonment and loss of freedom, dismissal certainly, but not imprisonment. Throughout history the most oppressive governments have been the socialist states and free speech died under the iron fist of total socialism. Governor Brown has proven how dangerous the progressive thought and speech police can be when not challenged by the so-called protectors of free speech.

Today pronoun use is criminalized, tomorrow it may be not standing for the National Anthem. Once again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Can you envision inmates in the California penitentiary system talking, one says they are jailed for attempted murder, the next for sexual assault, one for armed robbery and one for using the wrong gender pronoun? And the repressive, progressive left wonders why we have a President Trump.