Miller: Ill-informed post backfires on state senator

A Facebook post last week by state Sen. Willie Preston, D-Chicago, created a stir, caused one of his fellow Democratic Senators to bow out of a planned joint fundraiser and, ultimately, the entire fundraiser was canceled. It’s all a good illustration of the ill-informed, rapid-fire insanity of our social media-fueled era.

Sen. Preston posted an incendiary story by a notorious British tabloid about Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria. “Boxer ‘deemed male’ leaves Italian female fighter in tears at Olympics,” was the Daily Mail headline.

“This is wrong,” Sen. Preston wrote. “I respect all people however at a certain point we have to be insane to accept this. As a father of daughters, I cannot sit back and watch this anymore. We must save female sports. I plan on working on legislation that protects women sports. Women shouldn’t have to compete against anyone who is biologically a man.”

Preston wasn’t alone. People, mostly conservatives, took to their social media accounts with rage. Hard-right state Rep. Adam Niemerg, R-Dieterich, was one of them, reposting a tweet warning that allowing men to box with women was going to get somebody killed. “Men don’t belong in women’s sports!” Rep. Niemerg himself wrote. “End of discussion.” Some of his Republican colleagues also posted similar thoughts online.

But, as far as I could tell, Preston was the only Illinois Democratic state legislator to fall for the false outrage.

In reality, Khelif was born a female and her Algerian passport lists her as a female. The International Olympic Committee uses athletes’ passports to determine gender. Algeria is a Muslim country where gender change is illegal and even simply possessing a rainbow flag can result in a two-year prison sentence. Also, do you really think that Algeria, which banned the “Barbie” movie, would give a man a woman’s passport? C’mon.

Yes, Khelif was barred by the International Boxing Association last year, and the IBA’s executive director, who is a longtime Russian boxing official, recently claimed Khelif had both X and Y chromosomes, which some women do have (and which studies have found gives them no consistent sporting advantage). The IBA director earlier claimed Khelif had “elevated levels of testosterone.” So, I guess it’s possible she was juicing, but the IBA is so notoriously and thoroughly corrupt that the International Olympic Committee refuses to work with it (and that’s saying something, considering the IOC’s sordid history). Also of note, after the controversial Paris Olympics’ opening ceremonies, the IBA’s executive director called IOC President Thomas Bach “a chief sodomite.”

It took just a few minutes to find all that on Google.

Look, I truly do not care what you think about anything. This is a free country and I love it that way. So, if you’re a legislator and you want to ban people legally born as males from participating in female sports, that’s your right as a state legislator to try. Go ahead and file your bill and work your colleagues and invite the debate and let’s see how that all plays out.

However, if you, as a state legislator, publicly announce you’ll be introducing important state legislation to address an issue that makes you mad, I think we all have the right to expect that you first take at least a minute or two to double-check whether your outrage is actually valid before you pop off.

The members of the Senate Democratic caucus are more publicly close-knit than many nuclear families I know. Their public solidarity is really quite something to behold.

So, I wasn’t surprised when progressive state Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, refused to confirm that he’d bowed out of co-hosting a fundraiser with Sen. Preston. But I was told by very reliable sources that he did do so.

The other two Preston fundraiser co-hosts were Chicago state Sens. Michael Simmons and Lakesia Collins. Simmons is the Senate’s first openly gay member and Collins is a fiery and unapologetic progressive. Sens. Simmons and Collins have not responded to repeated inquiries from myself and my associate Isabel Miller about Preston’s post or about the event.

Preston also didn’t respond. But the Facebook post disappeared after we started making inquiries.

Maybe he learned.

And then the same day I told my newsletter subscribers about Preston and the fundraiser, the Senate Democrats told donors that the Aug. 7 event had been canceled.

All this because somebody let their emotions control their brain.

It should be a lesson to everyone in these crazy times.

• Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.