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EMPORIA The most important thing to know about 12-year-old Ashley Brooks is that she loves trains.

Her favorite walks are down to the railroad-adjacent Fremont Park in downtown Emporia, where the seventh-grader often records and uploads trainspotting videos to a YouTube channel and a following of almost 600 viewers.

Few are the immediate cares in Ashley's world, or at least none that would be much different from any other middle schooler's worries, like homework and fitting in.

In her mother Ryann Brooks' world, though, her biggest worries for Ashley are in the Kansas Statehouse.

Ashley is transgender, and under a bill passed by the Kansas Senate and under consideration in the House, girls like her would be banned from participating in Kansas interscholastic girls' sports at the middle and high school levels, as well as in college.

In her daughter, Brooks sees a regular 12-year-old girl who loves trains and tornado sirens, with the two even traveling the state to map them out on a custom Google map.

Ashley, in other words, is not what the proponents of the bill make her and other transgender girls out to be, Brooks said.

"Shes funny, shes got a sharp sense of humor," Brooks said."We just happened to be mistaken when she was born about who she was. She had to tell us. I think thats just how it is sometimes."

In Kansas and across the country, transgender youths have been dragged into a new front in the so-called culture wars, with similar legislation in three dozen states, as well as Washington, D.C.

Proponents of the fight, including a bevy of Kansas legislators and U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who introduced the federal legislation, argue it isn't about LGBT rights but rather ensuring a level playing field in interscholastic athletics.

More: Chillin' in the Statehouse Episode 8: Transgender Sports Bill

Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, compared it to having age and weight classes in sports like wrestling.

"I've seen emotional pleas that are disconnected wholly ... from basic fact about the bill, let alone well-established science," he said during debate on the Senate floor last week."I know there are emotions that exist in modern identity politics and in the political battlefield, if you will, that easily take us far, far afield when we discuss a subject like this.

"And without those things, quite frankly, this would be a very simple,non-controversial bill."

If a transgender child wishes to compete in school sports, currentKansas State High School Activities Association protocols request a student and family contact their school, which would make an assessment as to the team that child should play on and inform KSHSAA of the move.

The guidelines encourage schools to be proactive in ensuring that facilities are accessible and that coaches and teammates are sensitive and informed on issues like using the proper pronouns.

More: Senate bill banning transgender youths from Kansas sports is a bad solution looking for a problem

Proponents point to examples in other states where transgender athletes won state championships over their cisgender peers, but there is no indication that similar events have played out in the Sunflower State. KSHSAA has a record offive transgender students who are playing interscholastic sports in the state.

A hearing on the bill was scheduled for this week in the House Education Committee but was pulled at the last minute.

The chairman of the committee, Rep. Steve Huebert, R-Valley Center, said the issue remained in flux and noted that it could wind up being added into a separate bill that is being negotiated between the two chambers, a process known as a conference committee.

"It is not a dead issue, but, at this point in time, I don't see something being scheduled this week," Huebert said.

House Majority Leader Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita,said Wednesday the bill was still"being talked about among the parties." He was blunt when asked if it was true that leadership in his chamber was skeptical of moving forward with the bill.

More: Kansas Senate passes ban ontransgender youths in girls sports, despite boycott fears

"That is not true," Hawkins said. "A lot of rumors around here, most of them are not true."

But Thomas Whitt, executive director of Equality Kansas, said the House has historically been less open to "legislative gay-bashing."

"There is a pretty big plurality in the House, period, that is not excited about this kind of legislation," Whitt said. "The people of Kansas have moved on, for the most part, from targeting LGBT people for discrimination."

More: Bill restricting transgender youths in sports faces uncertain future as activists clash in hearing

Megan Paceley, an assistant professor and Coordinator for Diversity, Equityand Inclusion at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare, said transgender advocacy has been a part of the broader civil rights movement since at least the 1960s in the U.S., but transgender people themselves have been around forever.

The main reason the issue has come up in recent years, then, has been because of bills like the one in consideration in the House looking to limit transgender people's participation and access to public services and spaces, she said.

"Transgender people are people," Paceley said. "In debates about whether transgender people should be allowed to exist in certain spaces, I see a lot of people forgetting this. Also, numerous prominent medical and mental health organizations have stated that being transgender is not an illness not a mental illness and that gender exists in a continuum rather than a binary. There is research to support this."

Speaking to the Kansas Senate committee in February, Ryann Brooks shared her story with the legislators, wanting them to see a more personal side to the transgender sports issue.

Even though her daughter Ashley, a middle schooler, doesn't participate in school sports, the bill's mere purpose and intent is harmful to children like her, Brooks said.

"I wanted them to see someone it would directly impact, and my daughter is someone who is directly harmed by this legislation," Brooks said. "She sees stuff like this on the internet, or on the news, and she feels like she doesnt matter. And thats not OK with me. Nobody should feel that way, especiallynot a kid."

More: Lawmakers, activists push back as conservatives introduce bills on transgender youth

Ashley came out to her family last summer around her 12th birthday, Ryann said. But the family wasn't necessarily surprised by the revelation. Ashley had been questioning her gender identity for a few years, occasionally wearing traditionally female clothes.

It wasn't until Brooksand Ashley were in the car together possibly because Ashley felt more comfortable with Brooks distracted to bring up the sensitive matter, Brooks said that Ashley announced she was a girl.

"It was kind of surprising at that point, but at the same time, it wasnt surprising because she was so depressed and so anxious," Brooks said. "We knew it was something deeper, but she didnt have the words to tell us what was wrong.

More: Lawmakers, activists push back as conservatives introduce bills on transgender youth

"As a parent, when you know theres something wrong with your kid and you cant fix it its the hardest thing in the world, and its terrible," Brooks added. "Especially when theyre in such a dark place, and you dont want someone that young thinking about the dark thoughts she has had in her head before."

In South Dakota, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem opted to push for a rewrite of a similar bill related to transgender athletes, despite previously saying she supported it. Her decision, she said, was begrudging and came in the face of a likely legal challenge, as well as opposition from business groups in the state.

The Kansas Chamber hasn't rendered a position on the bill, according to spokesperson Sherriene Jones-Sontag. Critics, however, are already raising the prospects of an economic and sporting boycott as an argument to ward off the legislation's passage.

More: Gov. Noem creates 'Defend Title IX Now' coalition to fight for 'fairness in women's sports'

And then there is the legal risk feared by Noem when she rejected the South Dakota bill.

Idaho, the first state in the country to pass such legislation, has been taken to court over the matter, with a federal judgeruling in August that it was unconstitutional. The matter is pending appeal, but the ACLU of Kansas has already vowed a similar legal fight in Kansas.

The University of Kansas and Kansas State University urged the Senate to oppose the bill in written testimony submitted by attorneys representing the two universities, warningit "puts higher education on a certain path to numerous litigation situations."

"The guidelines for competition standards and competitor allowances is best left to those respective athletic governing bodies to establish its own competitive environment that works for its student-athletes and communities," the joint testimony read.

Paceley, the KU professor, said even if the bill were to only affect five students in Kansas, those five students still matter, and the bill is sending a message that transgender children are somehow unwelcome or flawed.

As many as 1.8% of U.S. youth identify as transgender, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control's 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and those children face substantially higher risks for depression and suicidality, as well as victimization at school.

More: Topeka City Council to discuss banning discrimination against gay, transgender people

"Importantly, the impact of these proposed policies is harmful even before a policy is passed even if it is never passed," Paceley said. "Legislation and policies that aim to limit or restrict transgender youth from spaces and services that other youth have access to is related to increased mental health issues, including suicide attempts.

"Transgender youth in Kansas are already being harmed by this proposed legislation."

At a bare minimum, the state Legislature should treat transgender people as people, Paceley said. Rather than focusing on bills prohibiting them from participation in certain activities or spaces, she said the Legislature should create bills to promote inclusion and nondiscrimination, as well as support funding for transgender organizations.

Whitt, the Equality Kansas director, pointed to years of work in bullying prevention which he believeswould be undone with SB 208.

"We know that these kids are exposed and vulnerable," he said. "This kind of legislation, it just paints a target on their back."

At Emporia's Fremont Park on Saturday, Brooks took Ashley to watchand record trains, before a longer trip heading west on the railwayto Strong City to do the same.

In those trips and efforts, Brooks said she is hoping to encourage and support Ashley's future.

"I hope for what any parent hopes for (their kids' future)," Brooks said."She has, since she could talk and knew what trains were, talked about working for the railroad. She wants to be an engineer one day. I want her to be able to explore the same opportunities that every other kid in the world has."

It's for that same reason Brooks said she can't be quiet about what she sees as not only a deeply personal issue, but one about basic rights. In her role as the news and online editor of The Emporia Gazette, Brooks with her daughter'spermission posted a column as a contrast to anearlier columnby Gazette editor Ashley Walker, wife of publisher Chris Walker,questioning if allowing transgender girls in athletics would be "making our girls pay the price."

Brookssaid she is by no means yet an expert on transgender youths, and maybe she never will be.

But for her and other parents working to better understand their transgender children, it's been encouraging to see a recent wave in acceptance among the Kansas community, especially in receiving what Brooks called an "incredibly positive" reaction when Ashley first enlisted her journalist mother to share the news she was transgender.

"In a lot of ways, weve come a long way as a community, but stuff like (the Senate bill) showwe still have a long way to go," Brooks said. "We just have to let kids be who they are. Thats just my whole thing. Ashley just wants to be who she is. Trans kids have such a high rate of suicide, but that risk goes down when they have supportive adults in their world.

"Im not going to let my kid be a statistic, and if that means being as loud as possible, then thats what it will be."

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'I'm not going to let my kid be a statistic': Kansas bill on transgender girls in holding pattern - The Topeka Capital-Journal

In January 1822 Haitis president Jeanne-Pierre Boyer sent a letter to a group of Paris-based intellectuals working to rally support for the Greek Revolution. Boyer connected the Haitians recent successful struggle against colonial tyranny with the Greeks own fight against slavery and despotism. In the revolutionary Greeks, Boyer saw the descendants of ancient Hellenes, the children of Leonidas, and the heirs of Miltiades. He registered his intention to offer monetary assistance while also noting the financial restrictions placed on newly independent Haiti.

The Haitian letter of support has, a little inaccurately, often been seen as the first formal recognition of the Greeks fight for independence. One myth still circulating in Greece even claims that Haitian soldiers joined the pro-Greek philhellenic legions. Yet Boyers references to the ancient world, and the parallels he drew between Greece and Haiti point to two key features of this moment: the mobilizing role of a particular version of classical antiquity and the wider transnational revolutionary context in which both events may be understood.

The Greek Revolution was far from a singular event. It accommodated different and, sometimes, conflicting political languages associated with Western, Ottoman, and indigenous political traditions. The revolutionaries ideas blended secular and Christian ideals; some even saw this as a redemptive millenarian battle in which the end of Ottoman control would coincide with the restoration of the Byzantine empire or in more extreme versions the Second Coming.

For a long time, historians regarded the Greek Revolution as essentially a story of the spread of ideas and practices from the center of the European enlightenment to the periphery. But in recent years, this paradigm is beginning to change. The Greek Revolution is now regarded as part of a wider global revolutionary context the moment of the liberal international.

The emergence of the Greek question in the 1820s mobilized public opinion across Europe. The mythologized ancient traditions of Hellas that Boyer invoked appealed to all manner of philhellenes: Christian humanitarians, abolitionists, Romantics, post-Napoleonic freedom fighters, and the radical followers of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, to name but a few. Every such group saw Greece as the land of opportunity for the materialization of their political and aesthetic ideas.

Conversely, for those fighting on the ground, the European and, indeed, the global interest in the Greek cause legitimized their struggle ideologically and materially. The framing of the war of independence as a Christian struggle also became a means of entry into the European family of nations. The aid the Haitian president couldnt offer was to be secured in the markets of the City of London in the mid 1820s. By then, the Modern Greeks, who mostly referred to themselves as Romioi (Romans members of the Ottoman Rm millet, or Roman nation), had come to be seen as unworthy inheritors of the Hellenic past.

Writing to Latin-American revolutionary Simn Bolvar in 1825, Bentham summed up his own involvement as a constitutional adviser to the Greeks, emphasizing the sympathy toward their cause:

When the Deputies from that Country came I not only received them upon a hospitable footing; but at their instance, maintained for a length of time a copious correspondence, in the course of which their language to me as well as that of their constituents, was that of children to a father. At their solicitation, I endeavoured, but in vain, to keep them upon good terms with their generous benefactors here the Greek Committee as they are called, by whom the first loan for them was procured.

Yet, Bentham continued, keeping them on good terms had been harder than expected:

But from first to last, their behaviour, I am sorry to say it, has been such as to render it impossible. Such a compound of ignorance, groundless suspicion, insincerity, faithlessness, incivility, negligence, quarrelsomeness, weakness of judgment, pride, vaingloriousness, frivolity, and in the whole together incapacity for political business, I could not have conceived unless I had witnessed it a guerrilla warfare seems to be all they are fit for. They have been perpetually quarrelling with one another, as well as giving to everybody who has come to them with assistance from other countries, but too much reason to complain of them; so that nobody can so much as conjecture how this contest with the still more incapable Turks will end.

Bentham would live to see the outcome of the Greek fight for independence. Indeed, in 1830 a protocol signed in London formally recognized the independent existence of a Greek state. The diplomatic breakthrough relied on the earlier successful allied blockade and destruction of the Ottoman Egyptian fleet in the Bay of Navarino in 1827 an event that scholars regard as an instance of humanitarian intervention.

Yet, the politics of humanitarianism and the attainment of human rights do not evolve in linear ways. While the Christian public sphere was not keen to discuss it, the forces fighting for Greek independence also targeted Muslim and Jewish populations, in the Peloponnese and elsewhere. And even then, the Greek state that emerged in the 1830s was far from homogenous.

Greeces formal independence marked the beginning of a protracted cycle of dependencies within the international system, as Russia, Britain, and France became its guarantor powers. The countrys political life coalesced around political parties bearing their name (the Russian party, the English party, etc.) and its heads of state were drawn from Europes courts. During the reign of Greeces first king, the Bavarian prince Otto, in the 1840s, it transitioned from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, and embarked on a project of territorial expansion.

One of the first independent states of the post-Napoleonic period, Greece exemplified the limitations of the concept of sovereignty and the workings of imperialism in the European family of nations. In the nineteenth century and deep into the twentieth, it continued to be the site of foreign interventions. Famously, it was in response to a late 1840s quarrel with Greece over indemnities owed to British subjects that British foreign minister Lord Palmerston pledged to guarantee the protection of imperial subjects across the world.

A few years later, during the Crimean war, British and French forces jointly occupied Greeces ports to force its neutrality; by the end of the nineteenth century European financial controllers roamed Athens assessing the finances of an expanded, but bankrupt state.

For these reasons, it is tempting to see the emergence of modern Greece as a laboratory of sorts: a laboratory of ideas about Christianity, liberty, and antiquity in the early nineteenth century, and of techniques of international-imperial governance for most of the two centuries that followed.

The territorial boundaries of the Greek kingdom in the 1830s were a fraction of Greeces current territory. The expansion of the state in the course of the nineteenth century is a complicated story one driven by geopolitical realities, economic necessities, and national-imperial motivations. But World War I was especially decisive, and in 1921 the centenary of the Greek Revolution could be celebrated in Asia Minor (today, the Asian landmass of Turkey).

Through astute diplomacy and opportunism, Greece emerged from the war as a victorious power and was rewarded with a temporary mandate over a region around the Ottoman city of Izmir (Smyrna). It presided over Orthodox and Muslim populations on the other side of the Aegean Sea, in lands coveted by Greek irredentist projects.

Yet, this project of national-imperial aggrandizement proved short-lived. The ensuing military conflict with the Kemalist Turkish-nationalist forces rapidly turned the dream into a bloody nightmare. The state that had emerged in the crossroads of liberal and national ideals projected to the world the consequences of territorial nationalism: misery, destruction, and population transfers. More than a million orthodox Greeks from Asia Minor settled across Greece in a tense political and cultural landscape.

The leading philhellene of the day was Henry Morgenthau, an American diplomat and president of the postwar refugee resettlement committee. He recounted the situation on the ground as he traveled to inaugurate an orphanage in the new Athenian borough of Vyron (a settlement named after Lord Byron):

The streets of Athens were transformed by the surging multitude that now invaded them. The city had been almost somnolent before this eruption. It had been living the staid life of an orderly small capital, where business had grown into established channels, and where life had settled into an easy and familiar routine. Overnight all this was changed. Now the streets were thronged with new faces. Strange dialects of Greek assailed the ear. The eye was caught by outlandish peasant costumes from interior Asia Minor.

Despite the large-scale destitution it brought, the Greco-Turkish exchange of populations became, in the eyes of some commentators, a curious success story. Liberals invested in minority protection pointed to the easing of tensions between Greece and Turkey in the 1930s to argue that forced displacement could solve nationalist conflicts; Fascists and Nazists regarded it as workable precedent for their own ethnic cleansing initiatives; imperial administrators viewed the refugee resettlement efforts in northern Greece as offering a template for partitions and settler colonial projects.

Greek nationalisms failures prompted a fresh return to an idealized version of antiquity, also coinciding with the emergence of Greece (and its ruins) as a tourist destination. Greeces interwar version of fascist authoritarianism basked in the glory of an imagined Christian, Hellenic tradition and attempted the creation of a Third Hellenic Civilization a synthesis built on a racialist reimagining of the conceptual links between antiquity and Christianity.

Eventually this regime was felled in 1941, following a failed Italian invasion and then an imposing Wehrmacht offensive. The Axis powers occupation regime brought dilapidated cities, hundreds of thousands of dead, and devastated livelihoods. Many Greeks did fight back, in a resistance spearheaded by communist guerrilla forces. Yet today there is no formal commemoration of the end of the great patriotic war. With the helping hand of the British forces, a brutal civil war erupted and the partisans who risked their lives against the Axis occupation found themselves deprived of their rights in forced exile across eastern Europe or rotting in Greek prisons.

Deprived of its progressive political forces, and its flourishing Jewish community, the Greece of the 1950s and 60s was a Cold War fortress on the edges of the West an anti-communist battleground marking the transition from British to American imperial hegemony. As President Harry Truman put it in his famous 1947 congress speech, Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and self-respecting democracy. The imposition of a military junta in the late 1960s brought the country closer to its southern European and Latin American counterparts. It also revived a grotesque version of Helleno-Christian ideas and practices harkening back to the Greek Revolution and to their interwar fascist iterations.

The restoration of democracy in the mid-1970s followed a more predictable script: the rehabilitation of progressive politics, a homegrown version of social democracy, and occasional arguments with Turkey over Cyprus and the Aegean Sea. The pursuit of Europeanization became the holy grail of Greek political elites and they were largely successful in it. By the early 1990s Greece exuded the aura of a seasoned European partner: a pillar of stability and peace in the region.

It only took a few months after the collapse of communism in neighboring Yugoslavia for the aggressive display of idealized remnants of classical antiquity to reappear in the countrys northern border. The so-called Macedonian question (a diplomatic conflict stemming from North Macedonias claim to self-determination) became a landmark of a decade of culture wars and open racism against eastern European migration. This new populist nationalism continued well after the dawn of the new millennium. The 2004 Olympics marked the peak of this newfound confidence of a modernized European country ruled by centrist forces.

But once again, Greece was proclaiming its historical agency just when it lacked it. By 2010 the Greek question returned to the forefront of European and global politics: the failing Greek economy raised debates about European solidarity and responsibility. Hit hard by the sovereign debt crisis, Greece became once more a site of economic intervention and experimentation.

International debate mobilized all available tropes to describe the new politics of emergency, from Benthams paternalistic language to humanitarian and philhellenic precepts. Crucially, many progressives across the world turned their gaze toward Greece, regarding it as a laboratory for practices confronting the violence of neoliberalism. For them, the cradle of democracy and the bastion of freedom had now turned into a bulwark of resistance to capitalism.

That was not the course things took; and Greece today celebrates its bicentenary in a COVID-ridden, post-austerity setting. This is a largely symbolic event, managed by a political elite in search of a sense of purpose, spending money it doesnt have. The state is planning a series of commemorative events spearheaded by a military parade in the presence of representatives from its former guarantor powers: France, Britain, and Russia.

The dominant political forces are creating pedestals for their respective heroes. The complex and contradictory lives of nineteenth-century figures are reduced to simplistic narratives of bravery and freedom, of us versus them, civilization versus barbarism. But now is not the time for pedestals. It is a time to pause and hear all those voices lost in the course of Greeces modern history to explore the plural threads that constitute our modern Greek identity.

If the spirit of the Greek Revolution lives on today, its heroes are those who continue to regard Greece as their home despite being deprived of basic human rights and suffering decades of racist abuse for not being white or Greek enough. Such is the story of Giannis Antetokounmpo the son of Nigerian immigrants who grew up in Athens in the 1990s and spent most of his life under de jure statelessness.

Despite his harsh treatment by the Greek state, Antetokounmpo never lost his courage and sense of civic duty. This day belongs to him and others like him. Antetokounmpos Greece is not Europes Mediterranean border guard. Rather, it is a space of openness and freedom of movement. It upholds the anti-racist and emancipatory legacy of the Greek Revolution the same spirit that traveled across the Atlantic and resonated with the black Jacobins.

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Greece's Fight for Independence Was Part of a Global Revolutionary Movement - Jacobin magazine

Over the past five years, ideas from the left particularly on race, gender and the economy have become increasingly influential within the broader Democratic Party. But there has also been a growing backlash on the right against what some Republicans refer to as woke ideology and cancel culture.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with senior writer Perry Bacon Jr. about his recent reporting on the ideas that have gained currency on the left and how the right has responded to them.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the play button in the audio player above or bydownloading it in iTunes, theESPN Appor your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts,learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show byleaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for good polling vs. bad polling? Get in touch by email,on Twitteror in the comments.

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Politics Podcast: How The Culture Wars Of The 2020s Are Shaping Our Politics - FiveThirtyEight

To millions of Americans, how much meat one does or doesn't consume is merely a dietary choice; to some far-right culture warriors, meat consumption is a political statement. And Colorado, according to Politico contributor Nick Bowlin, has becomeGround Zero in the meat battleas right-wingers rail against Democratic Gov. Jared Polis for declaring March 20MeatOut Dayin the western state.

Polis isn't demanding that Colorado residents give up meat entirely or even for a week. Rather, he is urging them to refrain from eating it for one day, and even that is a request not a command. Restaurants in Colorado will still be free to sell beef, pork or chicken on March 20.

But to far-right Colorado talk radio hosts like Dan Caplis and Ross Kaminsky (both on Denver's KHOW-AM 630), Polis isn't merely making a request he is assaulting Colorado's core values. Caplis, Bowlin notes in an article published by Politico on March 17, has described the governor's request as a "traitorous attack" that is "vicious and callous."

Republican politicians are throwing a hissy fit as well.Colorado State Sen. Jerry Sonnenbergsaid of Polis, "We can't have leadership in this state throw the number two industry in this state under the bus." And U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a QAnon supporter who was elected via Colorado's 3rdCongressional District in 2020, is calling for a "statewide BBQ on March 20."

Bowlin explains, "Food has long been a front in the culture wars, and no option on the menu has been more fraught over the past several decades than beef which holds a singular spot in the iconography of the American diet and even the myth of frontier expansion. But a long-term slide in beef consumption has put the industry on the defensive. In Colorado, that perceived threat to one of its dominant economic sectors has been exacerbated by a rapidly shifting political landscape that features a widening divide between the rural, often red parts of the state and the bluer, booming metro areas on the Front Range of the Rockies, where economic and political power is increasingly concentrated."

Despite his support for MeatOut Day, Polis is not a militant vegan. In fact, Polis himselfeats meat, although his partner, Marlon Reis, is a vegan and an animal rights activist.

And Bowlin points out that that Colorado governor "has largely tried to move on from the Meatless Day ruckus, which he has framed as blown out of proportion."

But Colorado's right, according to Bowlin, will latch onto any Culture War issues it can find as the state continues to trend Democratic.

Kenneth Bickers, who teaches political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Politico, "Colorado is increasingly a blue state.. The state as a whole has been trending in a blue direction for more than ten years."

Bickers cited the MeatOut Day controversy as an example of Colorado Republicans turning to Culture War issues to rally their base.

"It's a cultural symbol," Bickers told Politico. "Both parties have symbols. Symbols are powerful."

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How the far right is turning meat eating into a culture war battle - Salon

The movie Blazing Saddles debuted when I was a junior in high school, and the only thing I remember from that time is everyone talking about the campfire scene after all the cowboys had eaten beans.

Of course, this satirical spaghetti-Western film is so, so, so much more. According to Hollywood lore, it was one of the few movies of the 1970s to touch on racism. Sheriff Bart is Black and the people of Rock Ridge are aghast when the governor sends him to work in their town.

For years Ive watched Blazing Saddles whenever I find it on TV. Every time I laugh at the one-liners many racist and sexist and I think, Theres no way you could make this movie today.

Years later, director Mel Brooks addressed that very issue in an interview. I could barely make it then! he said.

Brooks wrote the script with Black comedian Richard Pryor, who insisted on the use of the N-word. All these years later, viewers are now warned about the language.

Culture wars, anyone? Cancel culture? Are we too sensitive or are we righting past wrongs?

I go back and forth on the issue.

Sometimes its just plain ignorance. I still remember the Rocky Mountain News editor who was horrified that I used the word Oriental in a story to describe a slain woman. Lynn! she said. The word is Asian.

Other times, its an attempt by someone to prove theyre not politically correct. A couple of years ago, I said, Happy holidays! to someone. Im not a liberal, the caller snapped. I say Merry Christmas.

The latest example of cancel culture, of course, involves Dr. Seuss.

Did you hear theyre banning Dr. Seuss books because some people think the books are racist? my brother-in-law asked.

Thats terrible, I responded. This political correctness has got to stop.

Then I found out it wasnt true.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises chose to no longer publish six books that included caricatures of people of African, Asian and Arab descent. I havent read one of Theodor Geisel's books in decades but I dont recall ever looking at them and thinking, Are you kidding? But times change and I cringed when I recently saw the images critics referred to.

Geisels stepdaughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post there wasnt a racist bone in that mans body, but also said suspending publication of the six titles was a wise decision. The Guardian reported, The controversy left many perplexed, since the decision was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.

Enter Fox News.

As clever columnist Mike Littwin of The Colorado Sun wrote: Dr. Seuss was not canceled in a box. He was not canceled with a fox. Thing One and Thing Two: Whatever you might hear on FoxNews, Seuss wasnt canceled with gall. His publisher withdrew six books with racist imagery, thats all.

My friend Deb Goeken once owned early editions of the Nancy Drew books, which included racial stereotypes. Over the years the language changed when the publishers republished editions about the young detective.

Cancel culture has also hit the food world. Long beloved and familiar brand names are gone or are going. That includes Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Buttersworth, Eskimo Pie and Uncle Bens.

Many of the announcements regarding new names and new packaging for these products were made in the wake of riots following the death of George Floyd, a Black man. His death in May 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement.

"The Mrs. Butterworth's brand, including its syrup packaging, is intended to evoke the images of a loving grandmother," Conagra said in a statement at the time. "We stand in solidarity with our Black and Brown communities and we can see that our packaging may be interpreted in a way that is wholly inconsistent with our values."

I never thought of those brand images as being racist, but when I googled Who is Aunt Jemima? the section People Also Search For popped up. It featured a photo of actor LeVar Burton with an iron collar around his neck. Kunta Kinte reads the tagline. Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped from Africa and sold into slavery, is the main character in the book Roots. I was in shock.

How could that happen if Aunt Jemima has nothing to do with slavery?

A conservative recently posted this on Facebook: So, if the Redskins cant be red, and Aunt Jemima cant be on the syrup, what do we call the White House (for the next four years)?

I read it to my brother-in-law, who pointed out that cosmetic companies also havent been immune to the Black Lives Movement. I looked it up.

News reports show Johnson & Johnson will no longer sell two skin-lightening lotions. L'Oreal is removing the words "white," "fair" and "light" from its skin products. Nivea's parent company is removing "whitening" and "fair" from products and marketing. Unilever is renaming it's popular Fair & Lovely cream to Glow & Lovely.

Lets get back to Blazing Saddles. Pryor was to play the sheriff but the studio refused to insure him, so Pryor recruited actor Cleavon Little.

Brooks thought there was too much of the N-word, but Pryor disagreed.

Richard said, No, we are writing a story of racial prejudice. Thats the word, the only word. Its profound, its real, and the more we use it from the rednecks, the more the victory of the black sheriff will resonate, Brooks recalled, in an interview.

After a sneak preview of the film, the studio chairman ordered Brooks to eliminate, among other things, all uses of the N-word and flatulence sound effects. Brooks ignored him and Blazing Saddles went on to become the top grossing movie of 1974.

The film features an all-star cast, including Brooks, Harvey Korman, Gene Wilder and the amazing Madeline Kahn. She plays Lili Von Shtupp, the dance hall singer who lisps through the film and lusts after the sheriff. At one point she sings, "Hewe I stand, the goddess of desire. Set men on fire. I have this powah. Morning, noon, and night is dwink and dancing Some quick womancing. And then a showah.

Shtupp, by the way, is one of Brooks contributions to the film. Brooks is Jewish and schtupp is Yiddish for doing the deed. Mike Littwin turned me on to that delicious factoid.

Blazing Saddles fans went slightly berserk last year when what is called a trigger warning was displayed on the movie, warning of racist comments and such.

New York Post columnist Kyle Smith had a field day.

Ridiculous, unnecessary trigger warnings are getting plastered all over everything. Realtors are afraid to use the term master bedroom. But HBO Max seems to think we all live in kindergarten. What kind of melonhead doesnt realize the purpose of the slurs in Blazing Saddles is to make the racists look bad? he asked.

In this case, the culture wars have gone overboard.

As Lili Von Shtupp would say, Its twue, its twue.

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BARTELS | In the culture wars, common sense is a casualty - coloradopolitics.com