If you want to control people's thoughts, begin by controlling their words.

That's totalitarian thinking.

It was once completely foreign to America, not anymore.

Increasingly, Americans are forced to use language against their will or even their conscience,

or be prepared to suffer the consequences.

And those consequences can be dire.

Take, for example, the issue of transgenderism, the newest civil rights battle of our time.

A decade ago, few people could even tell you what the word transgender meant.

Today, expressing the wrong opinion on the issue can cost you your business, or job, or both.

Consider recent state and local actions punishing those who declined to use an individual's pronouns of choice.

In 2017, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation threatening jail time

for health care professionals who willfully and repeatedly refuse to use a patient's preferred pronouns.

Under guidelines issued in 2015, by New York City's Commission on Human Rights,

employers, landlords, and business owners who intentionally use the wrong pronoun

with transgender workers and tenants face potential fines of as much as $250,000.

That's a steep price for saying he, instead of she, or she, instead of he, or even he, or she, instead of they.

What about the vast majority of citizens who hold the biology-based view

that chromosomes determine your sex, male or female?

Or those who have a deep-seated religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary,

God's purposeful creation?

In December of 2018, Peter Vlaming was fired from his job as a French language teacher

in a Virginia school district because he refused to refer to a transgender student

...