Picking wheat out of the chaff

     Sometimes I include the backstory. Sometimes I don't. Wednesday's column didn't come out of the blue — what happened was, two weeks ago, some Red State troll site posted my 2023 column, "Why Restrict Child Porn But Not Guns?" using the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution to argue that we could have some sane gun laws. My column basically said, "The 1st Amendment is important, but we carve out an exception for child porn, which is illegal to make, own and sell, in order to protect kids. So why not carve out a few exceptions to the 2nd Amendment — mandatory trigger locks come to mind — for the same goal?"
     Nothing earthshaking there, right? I don't know what about that reasoning, beyond that it suggested gun ownership should be subject to law, which it already is, drove gun nuts crazy. Or, rather, crazier. But they thrashed around when the column was first published. My theory is that the headline I wrote includes the words "child porn," drawing a Beavis and Butthead "Heh heh, you said 'child porn'!" reaction. Plus, maybe, since the idea of gun control is beyond their comprehension, their churning minds somehow mashed my reasoning into an argument for child porn. Hard to say. I'm not the Stupid Whisperer.
     Anyway, the kerfuffle died down, eventually, as kerfuffles do. But two weeks ago something happened to inject oxygen back into the embers — someone must have posted it on ArmedLunatics.com or some such thing. Suddenly the paper was inundated with calls — Why was the Sun-Times employing a pedophile? Three concerned colleagues mentioned it to me. I got my first real death threat.
     In thinking about the matter — my superpower, thinking about stuff — I began to wonder how turning "pedophile" into a random slur to throw at people who support policy you don't like, affects people who actually work with the actual problem. I made one phone call — to the Chicago Children's Advocacy Center — and they surprised me by calling back. Not something many organizations would do in our curled-up-in-a-defensive-ball era.
     In writing the story, I wondered how much context I should give. Why address this now? I had said something similar in a column a month ago, when my name made a cameo in the latest dump of the Epstein files. At first it was a long paragraph but then, as I cut — I typically write long and then pare — I decided what Char Rivette was saying is too important, and there was no need to dilute her message by interjecting myself into the equation. It did skew the story more toward Epstein, and less toward Trump fans calling everybody pedophiles — everyone, that is, but the alleged pedophile in the Oval Office. But that was probably okay. My editor agreed.
     I thought of tucking a little introductory italics graph here, on the blog, the kind of insider nod that EGD readers like. But then decided, just as, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna, so, if you're going to stay out of it, then stay out of it.
      But Thursday rolled around, and I figured I could unspool the back story, which might have enough heft to hold your interest, illustrated by a photograph of the sky the other night using my new iPhone 17. A big improvement.