At long last, the scourge of cisheterosexism will no longer harm the pristine forests of Oregon!
That’s thanks to the ouster of Mike Shaw, who served as the No. 2 at the state’s forestry department.
His sin? Reportedly looking “beyond gender and identity in hiring, seeking only candidates most qualified for the job.”
How dare he!
Doesn’t everyone know that properly maintaining forests must take (distant) second place to respecting the tender feelings of gender-confused millennials and Zoomers?
The forestry department’s DEI strategist, Megan Donecker, seems like she was behind the defenestration.
She further alleged that six queer-identifying staff members didn’t feel “safe or comfortable” on the job because they couldn’t freely have “conversations around pronouns.”
Pronoun convos being, of course, the sine qua non of successful forestry efforts.
Not expertise in dendrology, love of nature or administrative and scientific skill.
Shaw’s real crime, of course, was having the effrontery to suggest that the department — which boasts a budget of nearly $600 million — maybe focus less on DEI efforts and more on, you know, taking care of trees and such.
And yes, it’s funny to imagine a pink-haired mediocrity like Donecker carefully plotting the Machiavellian overthrow of Shaw because of pronouns.
It’s so on the nose that if it showed up in a satirical movie no one would buy it.
But there’s something very sobering going on here, namely the naked way in which Shaw was attacked precisely for trying to find qualified candidates.
That means his critics want to subsume the public interest to their perverse ideological needs, possibly putting Oregon’s splendid forests at risk — and they feel comfortable openly admitting it.
And if it’s happening in the Forestry Department, it’s happening elsewhere in Oregon’s state government.
As long as these signals keep emerging from the public and private sectors’ Byzantine middle-management setups, woke has not peaked.
Mike Shaw and everyone else still in touch with reality needs to increase the pressure till they win.
