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Commentary

Government may not compel speech

CHAUTAUQUA — Remember Lorrie Smith? You, faithful reader of this column, may have learned of her here in December 2022. As part of her business — 303 Creative, in Colorado — Smith engages in speech as a graphic artist by designing websites. And Colorado has a law banning ...

We’ve come a long way baby … maybe not

For a while, I thought we HAD come a long way. Women have made substantial inroads in business, the professions, and job equality. We may eventually catch up salary-wise, but honestly, I don’t expect to live that long. However, following a few recent experiences, my response is a loud, ...

Government’s grasp always growing

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how little it would take for a representative republic like ours to become a dictatorship. We saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that some of our politicians had a real need to tightly exercise authority over the citizens who elected them. In New ...

A love affair with print newspapers

It all began with baseball. I was growing up in the 1940s in Rochester, N.Y., a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals. I couldn’t get enough of them in the first newspaper I ever read, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The instant it came I grabbed the sports pages, flopped myself down on ...

Appreciating impact of Amish community

When I was growing up, there was an Amish community in Conewango. There was a cheese plant there to which Amish farmers could sell their milk. Since the Amish did not use electricity for cooling milk, they needed to get it to the cheese plant quickly and early on a daily basis. Today, Amish ...

Schooling and the social class

The existence of social class in the U.S. is no secret and social class is largely determined by the socioeconomic status of families and their children. With membership in a social class comes inherited beliefs and ideologies. Despite schooling, these frameworks of meaning tend to get passed ...