Political correctness is so rampant and inconsistent that its issues frequently clash, and progressive groups are forced to choose between which issue to champion and which one to betray.
For members who do not agree with their group’s prioritizing one cause over another and choose defend the cause their comrades have left in the dust instead, the result is often expulsion.
A case in point concerns a journalist whose expose of Jewish women being kicked out of a LGBTQ march in Chicago last month resulted in disciplinary action from her employer. For her accurate work, she was removed from the journalism department and parked in the sales division of The Windy City Times.
Despite winning several journalism awards and laudably donating her kidney to a sick individual, reporter Gretchen Rachel Hammond was still humiliated by the transfer. Although not admitted by her employer, the clear reason for this humiliation was her article exposing how three Jewish women who waved Israel flags during the Dyke March Collective were forced to leave by their fellow marchers.
According to an anonymous source she cited for the article, the reason for the ouster was that the pro-Israel demonstrators clashed with the event’s “anti-Zionist” stance.
Alexis Martinez, who marched in the Dyke March Collective, may have led the backlash against Hammond by accusing her paper of having “failed in its journalistic mission” by supposedly not talking with her before Hammond’s story broke.
In an interview, Martinez refused to apologize and was vague on the reasons for the ouster, merely saying that the organizers of the march “did nothing wrong. Those people who are asking us to apologize need to come up with facts. They need to have been there, on the ground and involved in the situation to have some validity.”
But if an anonymous reader is to be believed, some of Martinez’s group “bullied and attacked” Hammond with “anti-Semitic” slurs.
Nevertheless, the paper undoubtedly caved in to the backlash unleashed by the marchers rather than following the traditional journalistic practice of supporting their reporters.
The paper’s executive editor, Tracy Baim, claims otherwise saying that “we stand by our reporting on our stories.” But Baim refused to answer why Hammond’s name has not appeared on any stories and is no longer listed on the paper’s masthead as a senior writer and instead appears now as a senior account executive.
Although The Windy City Times is not standing by her, she nevertheless remains loyal to her employer, saying of the transfer in an email:
“At this time, I have not been fired from Windy City Times, but I have been transferred to working full time for the sales department. “The reasoning is an internal matter and I have been instructed not to comment about it even to close friends. Given my present situation, I must comply with this instruction.”
Hammond is not motivated by bashing homosexuals. Proof of her sympathies with LGBTQ rights was recognized when she received the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Award for Excellence in News Writing in 2016.
