Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach and publisher of Nevada News & Views
(Chuck Muth) – During the 2015 legislative session, some conservative members of the state Assembly pushed a “transgender” bill that would have banned boys from using the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms and vice-versa.
Establishment Republicans killed the bill, of course, but one loud-mouthed liberal blogger had a conniption over the legislation and mounted a personal jihad against its conservative GOP supporters.
“I sometimes think some of these members of the Assembly Republican Caucus have been beamed into the Legislature from some alternate universe where it's still 1345 AD,” Jon Ralston wrote during the session as the bill was being debated. “Some are blinded by the limitations of their IQ. Some are colored by their religions. And some are simply nasty human beings.”
Jihad Jonny went on to blather that this was “another unconscionable embarrassment for Nevada and yet another outrageously idiotic move by a caucus populated by lawmakers who will be known two years from now as accidents of history.”
And in a post-session column last September, Nevada’s #2 liberal blogger with a little-watched taxpayer-subsidized TV show wrote that the Elko school board, which took similar action to block trannies from using their opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms, of “a procession of ignorance.”
He specifically accused conservative Assembly John Ellison of “the kind of ignorance that is hard to teach and impossible to fathom” before dipping deep into his highly-touted college edu-macation to describe such thinking as “lunkheadedness.”
Whatever. But here’s the thing…
Many of us couldn’t understand why Jonny-on-the-Spot-a-Pot had his tights in such a terrible twist over such a common sense bill that simply said boys must use the boys’ bathroom and girls must use the girls’ bathroom and trannies could use a gender-neutral bathroom if he or she so chose.
This week we found out.
Turns out Jon’s adopted daughter, Maddy, turned herself into Jake – an important little detail that this supposedly professional journalist failed to disclose in any of his rants on the subject that I know of for over a year now.
Indeed, I now understand – and even empathize – with Ralston’s situation. And his blog post this week finally revealing what he’s known for years was absolutely beautiful.
Say what you will about what a jerk this guy is in politics – and not because he’s a liberal, but because he’s, well, just a jerk – the man has nevertheless been an excellent father to Maddy/Jake.
However, I find it to be a SERIOUS breach of journalistic ethics to have been attacking conservatives on the other side of this issue without disclosing his own personal circumstances, prejudice and clear bias on the subject.
As professional journalists go, this guy’s a joke. As well as a jerk.
