I like to provide thoughtful responses… though as you inferred they tend to get long winded (which I don’t disagree with). Zoom is not a good forum for me as I like to refresh my facts by researching them prior to responding.

For background, my immediate family is very diverse. My wife is Asian. My first wife was white. I have three white children, and two Asian American children. My three older white children married an African woman from Zimbabwe, a white man, and the other girl married a Nigerian man, divorced him, and later had a Haitian man as a partner, subsequent to that an Indian man.

I am a product of MLK, Jr. growing up in the 60s and embracing his worldview that people should be judged by their character and not their skin color. So, this focus on identify politics is very troubling for someone that has pursued “character” over skin color not just in his career but in his personal life.

Those values translated to my children. And as a result, my three older children have produced four African American grandchildren, two white grandchildren, and one Haitian American granddaughter. Time will tell who the youngest two girls determine to spend their lives with, but they will be minimally Asian American.

So, my point is simple. I want the values of America express in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution to extend to all Americans. I think we have made great strides towards those goals most recently extending those same freedoms and rights to those in the LGBT community.

I want all my children and grandchildren to have the freedom to be individuals, with equal civil rights and freedom from discrimination. I am strongly concerned that increasingly these “freedoms” are being subsumed by a society designed to force people to follow some weird behavior labeled as “politically correct or woke” and to identify with some political constructed identity group rather than chose people based on their characters. Failure to comply with these social pressures risks social ostracism as seen in the response by many African American leaders towards their more conservative fellow African Americans with labels like “Oreo” or even “racist”. The mere fact that we have added the word “cancelled” to our lexicon to reference how people are treated for simply being individuals with different opinions is scary.

Imagine if “cancellation” extended from a social phenomenon to a political one as we abandoned those rights protected in the Constitution. Live long enough and you will see the winds of political power swing back and forth, never advocate powers for government, you would hate to see in the hands you vigorously disagree with. I was a liberal in 60s, when conservatives tried to impose the “love it or leave it” mentality on the nation. And I remain a classical liberal today… I find the use of “liberalism” by progressives as the abuse of a word which anyone can see by the word itself is rooted in “individual liberty” not in collective conformity to some idea of “correctness”.