A lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization representing a Connecticut high school sprinter who sued the state for allowing transgender athletes to participate in female sports, complained Thursday that USA Today bowed to a “woke” backlash and changed her words in a published op-ed piece.
“USA Today published our client Chelsea Mitchell’s opinion about the unfairness she experienced being forced to compete against male athletes,” ADF attorney Christiana Holcomb said in a Twitter thread. “But after backlash from the woke mob, editors unilaterally changed Chelsea’s words & called them ‘hurtful language.'”
In her op-ed, as printed in USA Today, Mitchell said she lost “four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to transgender runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two transgender runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.”
Mitchell didn’t say in her original article that she lost to transgender runners; however, she wrote that she lost to male runners.
“What was the ”hurtful language” that editors deleted from Chelsea’s opinion piece three days after publication? The word ‘male,'” Holcomb tweeted. “USA Today violated its principles to appease the mob.”
Such “blatant censorship violates the trust we place in media to be honest brokers of public debate,” said Holcomb, adding that because “Chelsea’s experience and viewpoint matters,” the ADF chose to print her piece in full.
USA Today, which published Mitchell’s article last Saturday, updated it on Wednesday and included an editor’s note, apologizing for allowing “hurtful language” and saying it was changed to reflect the newspaper’s “standards and style guidelines.”
Source: Newmax
