An article bylined by Alexandra Leslie and Melanie DaSilva for WPRI is a perfect illustration.

The headline is, “McKee signs multiple bills supporting women’s health, equity.”  No ambiguity.  No clarification that this is politicians’ intention.   It’s presented as a simple fact about the press conference.

The article summarizes five pieces of legislation without offering a single opposing view or even a hint that there might be tradeoffs.  In short, it’s simply progressive propaganda.  Unfortunately, one gets the impression that’s what has been passing for journalism instruction at institutions like Leslie’s alma mater, the Roy Park School of Communications at Ithaca College.

To read such articles is to absorb the narrative that the government is slowly taking easy steps that are obviously good and necessary.  Why so slowly?  Nobody knows.  Presumably, mysterious forces of greed and bigotry are holding back progress for no good reason.

No wonder younger generations who’ve been marinated in this ideology are prepared to have faith in concepts like “systemic racism.”  How else can one explain the slothful progress of society despite the absence of clear villains?  (This puts a clarifying light on the periodic overtures to proclaim logic and objectivity to be intrinsic to the bigotry.)

Take an obvious example:

The second bill (2021-S 0003A, 2021-H 5763) will ban health insurers from using gender rating, a discriminatory practice of charging women and men different premiums for individual insurance.

Bill sponsor Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski (D-Dist. 37, South Kingstown, New Shoreham), said she’s introduced the gender rating bill for a decade.

“Women are sometimes charged 10% to 25% to 50% more than men for health insurance providing identical coverage, especially during the age bracket associated with child bearing years” Sosnowski said.

“Equal rights mean equal cost, as well as equal pay. This bill is a huge step that will end gender discrimination in healthcare in Rhode Island,” she added.

Note the apparent inability to understanding actuarial science as anything other than “a discriminatory practice.”  Consequently, the politician gets away with the outright lie that men and women have “identical coverage.”  That’s simply not the case, and a reader almost has to laugh at the suggestion that the discrimination is especially bad “during the age bracket associated with child bearing years.”

The Woke may claim that men can bear children, but it simply isn’t biologically factual.  In other words, men’s insurance coverage implicitly does not include pregnancy, because men don’t get pregnant.  When they buy insurance, they’re paying for different products.

Now, we can decide, as a society, that men ought to pay more for insurance as a subsidy for women, given the importance of childbirth for all of us, but a more-accurate, aware, and factual decision like that introduces judgment and legitimate differences.  In that sort of environment, the progressive elite might not win the argument and might not get its way.  Worse, the discussion might leak into progressive no-go zones like the benefits of stable, two-parent, opposite-sex families.

Featured image by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.