In a story published online Friday and appearing in Saturday’s print edition, The Washington Post was beside itself over the fact that a bill that would have “finalized the location of the Smithsonian American Women’s history Museum” collapsed Thursday because Republicans made it “a political football” by inserting an amendment to ensure it actually honors women and not men pretending to be women (i.e. trans women).
Jonathan Edwards was sent to kneel at the altar of transgenderism, putting in quote marks the GOP’s push “to limit...exhibits to ‘biological women’ and bar it from depicting ‘any biological male as a female.’”
And yet, Oliver Darcy and the so-called media reporting class want the world to think The Washington Post is some bastion of MAGA under Jeff Bezos’s ownership and post-layoffs.
The headline and subhead illustrated the absurdity of denying basic reality to placate a crowd that uses suicide as a heckler’s veto when discussing facts: “How a bipartisan women’s history museum became a political football; Efforts to place a Smithsonian museum on the National Mall collapsed this week after Republican lawmakers inserted language about ‘biological women’ and the president’s powers over its location.”
The print headline and subhead were even more slanted: “Political moves scuttle bill to set site for women’s history museum; Inclusion of anti-trans language doomed bill about women’s museum.”
Edwards bemoaned in the lede that “[p]olitical fights over transgender rights and President Trump’s sprawling effort to physically remake Washington” — and not Democrats refusing to play make believe — were why efforts “stalled” on “a more than a decade-long bipartisan effort to build a women’s history museum on the National Mall.”
If you were to ask Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlon whether their collegiate careers were “political fights,” they would probably disagree because it was their actual lives, not a political scoreboard.
Edwards laid out two complaints from Democrats, but it sure seemed as though the first one was more of an issue (click “expand”):
A bill that would have finalized the location of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum failed Thursday in the House on a 216-204 vote. Democrats withdrew their support after Republicans amended the legislation to limit the museum’s exhibits to “biological women” and bar it from depicting “any biological male as a female.” Democrats also objected to provisions that would have given Trump the power to choose an alternative site within six months of the legislation becoming law.
“Women deserve to tell our own story. That is why the Democratic Women’s Caucus and House Democrats worked tirelessly to block the radical, divisive Republican amendments to the Women’s History Museum bill that gave Trump and his ballroom buddies control,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-New Mexico), chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus said in a statement after the vote.
“Two months ago, the legislation appeared to be on a glide path to establishing the museum’s future home...But in a March committee markup, Rep. Mary E. Miller (R-Illinois) introduced what Democrats called ‘a poison pill partisan amendment,’ adding the anti-trans language and provisions giving Trump ultimate control over the museum’s site,” Edwards added, taking exception to the “anti-trans language.”
He explained that, following Miller’s move to ensure women and only women are honored at the museum, “more than 140 Democratic lawmakers” told Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in an April 16 letter that he must strip this amendment “or risk losing their support.”
Much of the article’s back-end was a history lesson to show how slow Washington moves when establishing a new national museum. For the women’s museum, the process began “in 2014 when Congress created a bipartisan commission to study the idea,” which completed its work in 2016. It wasn’t until 2020 when “Congress authorized the museum...alongside a companion institution, the National Museum of the American Latino.”
Edwards eventually returned to standing up for his fellow men so that they too could be honored in the women’s museum, bemoaning the Trump administration had “targeted a display at the National Museum of American History that mentioned trans athletes, as well as a statement about trans women by one of the new museum’s leaders.”
He also acknowledged the White House’s support for the amendment because, in their words, it would ensure this new Smithsonian would be “presenting the history and experiences of actual women and prevent[ing] the museum from depicting males as women” and “propagandiz[ing] for corrosive ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex and, in fact, harm women in athletic and many other contexts.”
Let this be another lesson that, for every proclamation from the left and their media allies demanding conservatives return to a world based on facts, they themselves are incapable of doing so on something as basic as human biology.
