Wyoming Remembers the Armenian Genocide

On this day (April 24) in 1915, the Ottoman Empire (modern day Turkey) arrested about 250 Armenian leaders in the capital city of Constantinople. They were transported 300 miles east to a prison where hundreds more joined them. Then they were executed without trial.

This event is remembered as the start of the Armenian Genocide, which murdered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1923. That’s a full quarter of the entire Nazi Holocaust! Have you ever been told the story?

Armenia became a kingdom in the fourth century BC. Armenians live in the Armenian Highlands near Mt. Ararat, the final resting place of the biblical ark. Through the Christian apostle, St. Bartholomew, the Armenians became the first kingdom in the world to adopt Christianity as its religion.

Through more than 18 centuries, they held together as an ethno-religious group living under various occupying governments. Beginning in 1555, a series of treaties allowed the Armenians to be a semi-autonomous state within the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

A new era came about in 1908 when the Committee of Union and Progress (the “Young Turks”) staged a coup d’etat. Many Armenians thought that this would bring them full independence as a nation. The Young Turks had other plans.

As various territories of the former Ottoman Empire were gaining their independence from what we now call Turkey, the Young Turks decided that the only way to keep the inner provinces from breaking away would be to neutralize the significant Armenian Christian populations found there.

Three of the highest officials in the Turkish government placed other Young Turks in various positions of power while also creating a Special Organization comprised of criminals and irregular troops to carry out the mass deportation and murder of Armenians in the interior provinces.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, they began to execute this plan. Within three weeks, all Armenian males between the ages of 20 and 45 were conscripted into the army and taken away from their homes and families. A week later 56,000 Turkish troops were garrisoned in Christian schools and churches in the Sivas province.

By late September Armenian populations were given orders to turn in all weapons from firearms to kitchen knives. Three days later, the same government began distributing weapons to Muslim residents, claiming that the Armenians were unreliable.

Meanwhile communications were systematically shut down. The telegraph system was censored, and foreign postal service was ended. Disarmed, decapitated of political and family leadership, surrounded, and cut off from the outside world, the Armenians were as vulnerable as any people could be.

Then began the slaughter.

Bands of chetes began looting, violating women and children and murdering Armenians in the interior provinces of Turkey. Days after news reached the Armenian leaders in the capitol, Constantinople, a proclamation of jihad was issued which legalized the chete organizations and was sent out to all the provinces of the Empire.

Mass public executions of Armenian soldiers, who had been conscripted into the army only three months earlier, further terrorized the Armenian population. Over the next several months Armenians who had been deferred in the first draft were conscripted nonetheless. By March of 1915 those Armenians serving in the army were stripped of their weapons and uniforms.

Orders were sent from Constantinople to expel Armenians from any government posts—elected or appointed. The remaining Christian schools and churches were requisitioned as barracks for the Turkish army. The homes of many Armenians, together with horses, carts and other travel equipment were also seized by the army.

All of this happened prior to the official beginning of the genocide. The arrest and execution of Armenian politicians and intellectuals in Constantinople unleashed the slaughter on a massive scale. As a rule, community leaders were arrested and executed. Then, the remaining population was rounded up and forced to march into the Syrian desert.

They were told that camps with food and water awaited them at the end of the march. Most died of starvation and dehydration on the way and those who survived were slaughtered on arrival. All these atrocities continued throughout the years of World War I. While most of the world was focused on the fighting in Europe, the most ancient Christian people in the world was being systematically exterminated.

When the war ended, there was a brief respite. But, in 1920 the atrocities recommenced and continued at least until 1923. Some say they are still ongoing to this day.

Historians and academic institutions that study genocide have come to a consensus that the systematic massacres and deportations of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire formally constitute the 20th century’s first genocide. The United States has joined 28 other countries in recognizing and denouncing the genocide, although the current and past three administrations have refrained from using the term “genocide” to avoid offending Turkey.

Despite this consensus, and the multitude of eyewitness survivors, photographs and other documentation, Turkey and Azerbaijan flatly deny the historical factuality of the Armenian Genocide. Germany’s total surrender at the close of World War II gave Allied forces access to the extermination camps and records documenting the Jewish Holocaust. But the Turkish government, for more than a century, has been allowed to thwart any independent, international investigation of the Armenian Genocide.

Ongoing refusal by Turkey and Azerbaijan to acknowledge and denounce this evil, together with the dogged resistance of numerous other nations, remain a blight on the human rights record of the United Nations. Although the 1985 Whitaker Report formally detailed how these events fit the UN definition of genocide, no action has been taken.

As the first genocide of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide set a precedent that would soon be followed on an even larger scale by the Nazi regime. A week before invading Poland, Adolph Hitler reportedly told his commanders, “I have given the order—and will have everyone shot who utters but one word of criticism—that the aim of this war does not consist in reaching certain geographical lines, but in the enemies' physical elimination. Thus, for the time being only in the east, I put ready my Death's Head units, with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?” Who, indeed, speaks of it?

I discovered, in researching this column, that Wyoming is still talking about the Armenian Genocide. On April 21, 2017 Governor Matt Mead made Wyoming the 45th state to recognize it. In a letter to the Armenian National Committee of America, he wrote, “The atrocities of both the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts were unimaginable, but it is important for all to remember – history must not repeat itself.” State Senator Anthony Bouchard, a leading voice behind recognizing the genocide, reminded Wyomingites that Azerbaijan and Turkey continue their genocidal policies against the Armenian homeland, as seen during the April 2016 beheading and mutilation of Armenians in Artsakh by Azerbaijan’s forces.

This history was never taught to me in any of my formal schooling. For this reason, on this 103rd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, I simply wanted to tell the story and keep its memory alive. My hope is that our school teachers—from elementary to junior college—will take this occasion to teach their own students this important history, as they do already concerning the Jewish holocaust.

Consent, Taboo and #MeToo

Last week Sean Westin was acquitted on charges of sexual assault. The embarrassing details of the case were splayed across the pages of the Uinta County Herald. Sean, a body builder who worked as a personal trainer used his position to solicit sexual favors from a client.

At issue in the trial was whether her consent was freely granted. The woman’s traumatic brain injury as a child, her huge disadvantage in physical strength and the threat of monetary loss all combined to raise the question of whether she was capable of free consent.

In another case, a federal judge in Casper awarded Amanda Dykes $221,000 in back pay, ruling that she had no choice but to resign from her job in the Wyoming Military Department. In this case, there was no sexual activity and no consent. Nor was there threatening conduct, verbal abuse, or obscene language.


Rather, her supervisors failed to protect her from the unwanted advances of Don Smith, the director of the Youth Challenge Program at Camp Guernsey. He was apparently dissatisfied with his own marriage and took to email, written notes, and personal visits to Amanda’s work space to attempt an extramarital affair.

U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled that Smith’s persistent advances after Dykes had rejected them created a hostile work environment. In a stinging letter he rebuked the Wyoming Military Department saying, “[they] should be embarrassed by the multiple failures” of Dykes’ supervisors to address her complaints effectively.

Meanwhile, at Utah State University in Logan, the piano program has been rocked by allegations of sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault. On April 6, 2018 the investigative agency, Snell & Wilmer, released a report of its investigation into abuses alleged on social media in mid-February.

Professor Gary Amano, long-time Director of the USU piano program and world-renowned piano teacher has retired in its wake. To be clear, he is alleged to have discriminated, but not to have harassed or assaulted anyone himself. He remains well-respected piano professional. The question is whether he and other supervisors did enough to address complaints of harassment and assault by others in the department.

USU Press Conference

The perpetrators of the harassment and assault appear to be three former, and one present members of the piano faculty (their names were not released). Over the course of two decades, there were both allegations and admissions of inappropriate sexual relations between students and faculty. The investigators have concluded that these were known to the heads of the program but were not adequately addressed.

Both those engaged in student sexual affairs and those supervisors faulted for lacking supervision and discipline defended themselves by asserting that the sexual contact was consensual.

There’s that word, again. All three cases—and a jillion more—hinge on the question of consent. Inappropriate professor-student relationships, inappropriate extramarital relationships, inappropriate trainer-client relationships are all justified by the nebulous claim of consent.

All three of these cases sicken me.

Let’s be perfectly clear. None of these things should have been done. Women and men were seriously hurt, with lasting effect. They were hurt psychologically, physically and spiritually. Budding careers were derailed, academic progress impeded. People who placed themselves and their children in the care of others were betrayed by institutions and persons who should have been safe and nurturing.

What has gone so wrong with our world that so many people in so many walks of life are being hurt in such terrible ways? What should we be doing to reduce these harms? These are the question with which we should be wrestling.

The answers are not simplistic. We should start with the admission that such evils have always been perpetrated among human beings. But while admitting this, we should also notice that far more people are being hurt today than in previous generations.

These two admissions both agree on one thing. Human sexuality is entirely different than animal sexuality. There is not a single case of long-term psychological or emotional damage caused by disordered sexuality among dogs, cats, or laboratory mice. Nor are there any sexual predators in the animal world. Those are only found among humans acting inhumanely.

Societies that understand the deep, spiritual meaning of human sexuality have worked together to guard and protect one another from abuses that arise when sexuality is downgraded to mere animal instincts. As our own society has abandoned these basic truths, we have seen untold damage to families and to individuals—both men and women, both children and adults.

The first step to recovering sexual sanity is to be clear on this point. In the animal world, desire and consent are all that matters. Not so among humans. For us, there are some things that should never be desired and should never receive consent. These are taboo.

Many of these are still recognized in law. Incest, bestiality and pederasty are among them, so also statutory rape. No amount of consent, by any definition, can make such things right.

Related to these are policies in the work place and in schools that protect people from unwanted advances. School is an extension of the home. It is the place where parental guidance and instruction are carried out on behalf of parents. That is the fundamental reason why every school has policies prohibiting the sexualization of the teacher-student relationship.

This taboo was downplayed and ignored on the USU campus and many people were hurt as a result. Parents who felt betrayed by inappropriate faculty relations with their children were completely in the right. Age has nothing to do with it. The nature of the relationship was at stake.

Part of this taboo involves a power differential. Professors have such enormous power over the future of their students that special care must be taken to protect the student from the abuse of this power. That means questions of sexual consent should not even be possible.

The same goes for monetary pressure and work relationships. That’s why prostitution is not treated as private consent, but as a public harm. If we can’t understand this in the abstract, the current explosion of human trafficking should help us see the light.

Then, there are marriage promises made before a judge. Why should a judge be involved in hearing the promise, “til death us do part,” if he doesn’t care whether or not the promise is kept? Quite apart from whether Mr. Smith was being inappropriately persistent in his amorous pursuit of Ms. Dykes, somebody should have taken him to the woodshed for violating his marriage vows.

One of the problems that we face today is the disintegration of public morals that are meant to safeguard people from sexual abuses that the law is incapable of stopping. These taboos are not mere holdovers from an unenlightened past. They represent the wisdom of generations that were far-and-way more enlightened than ours.

It’s time to stop attacking taboos in favor of the unfettered pursuit of every desire and the absolute freedom to consent to anything at all. It’s time to reconsider how we might protect one another from a view of human sexuality that never rises above the animal instincts.

Science, Accountabilty, and the EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency was created 47 years ago. It is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, nor does it owe its existence to an act of congress. Its genesis, rather, is an executive order signed by President Richard Nixon on December 2, 1970.

It was created in response to the National Environmental Policy Act, and intended as an umbrella agency to “permit coordinated and effective government action on behalf of the environment.” Since that initial legislation, congress has enacted dozens of other environmental laws that are administered by the EPA, which has an annual budget of more than $8 billion.

Like every other governmental agency, once created it took on a life of its own. Its chief administrative officer and a few secondary officers may be appointed by the president, but the other 15,000 employees are unaccountable bureaucrats.

I realize that the term “unaccountable bureaucrats” has a pejorative ring to it. I assure you that it is not intended as an insult, merely an accurate description. A bureaucrat is simply a person who rules (crat) in a bureau (an agency). Anybody who makes and enforces rules fits that description. “Unaccountable” simply means that a person is given a certain amount of discretion to do so.

Over the years many unaccountable bureaucrats have sullied the term by abusing their discretion. But many others have served faithfully and well by holding themselves accountable to a higher standard. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Good government is always a balancing game between allowing the freedom to unleash human ingenuity, on the one hand, and providing reasonable and enforceable boundaries on the other hand. This is true both for an administrator’s judgments over bureaucrats, and for the rule of those bureaucrats over ordinary citizens.

The chief administrative officer is charged with balancing these competing concerns. In doing so, he or she will always be criticized by many in the bureaucracy for not giving them enough discretion, power, or money. That’s no surprise. But limits on the bureaucrats allow human ingenuity to flourish in the private sector.

That’s the battle unfolding in the EPA right now. Administrator Scott Pruitt has been on the job for a year and has become the focus of a lot of negative press lately. His critics are bureaucrats and their sympathizers in the progressive press. None of them is happy with the accountability measures he is putting in place at the EPA.

Last October I wrote in these pages about how Pruitt put an end to the underhanded practice of “Sue and Settle,” which bypassed the congressionally mandated regulatory process. Agency insiders would instruct radical environmentalists when and how to sue the agency. Then, they would settle out of court and have a judge rubber-stamp a new rule without having to go through the careful public process.

Putting an end to that practice did not make Pruitt popular among career bureaucrats,  but it was most certainly faithful to his oath of office and his mission as the chief administrator of the EPA.

About the time I was writing about “Sue and Settle,” Pruitt changed another long-time practice at the EPA, one that virtually guaranteed skewed science. The agency uses part of it’s $8 billion budget to award research grants. This is intended to pay scientists to compile and analyze data so that the agency can make environmental decisions with the best objective knowledge base.

It looks good on paper, but there are hidden pitfalls. When the government has billions of dollars to spend, and a scientist needs only a few thousand to put bread on the table, it creates a gigantic power differential that is open to abuse.

Bureaucrats can funnel research grants to scientists who support their agenda and withhold money from those who don’t. When this happens consistently enough, word gets out in the scientific community and pressures everyone to toe the line.

Government-awarded research grants can make the difference between keeping a program afloat and needing to find a new job. You can imagine how strongly that can influence research outcomes. I make no particular accusations here; you can research the subject yourself. I am only pointing out that among mere mortals, the incentive to skew science is strong.

Pruitt has not directly addressed this problem. Instead, he addressed a related practice that made the problem even worse. Breaking its own ethical standards, the EPA has been appointing these same scientists to its own advisory boards.

This creates a situation of inbreeding. Not only can the EPA put its huge thumb on the scale to affect research, it could also amplify that skewed research by giving those scientists direct influence over the policymakers.

Last fall, Pruitt ended this over-the-top abuse. Now, scientists simply have to choose one or the other. They can either serve on EPA advisory boards without EPA money given to their research programs, or they can receive EPA research grants and step down from the boards. They can’t do both. While this doesn’t end all temptation to skew science, it does moderate it greatly.

In late March, Pruitt announced another improvement in EPA accountability; the EPA will ban the use of “secret science.” This sounds like a no-brainer. After all, the very word “science” means knowing. How can you have knowledge that is unknown (secret)?

One of the fundamental rules of science is that research should be objective and repeatable by any other scientist. This is the whole idea of “peer review.” If your own scientific colleagues cannot verify your research, it is worthless science.

But for years the EPA has been making and enforcing rules on the basis of “scientific studies” that it refuses to release to the public. For decades, expensive air quality regulations have been promulgated, based on tax-payer funded studies conducted by Harvard and BYU. But when an EPA advisory panel asked to review the studies, it was denied.

Later, congress also asked for access to the studies. It too was refused. So, in 1998 it  passed a law requiring that scientific data used by the EPA to make rules be released to the public. But, a federal judge threw out that law. In 2013 it subpoenaed the information. The EPA still refused.

Finally, the House of Representatives passed three separate bills to stop the EPA from making regulations based on “science” that is unavailable to the public. None of these became law. So, after the EPA sandbagged the American public for a quarter of a century, Pruitt finally corrected the situation himself.

He signed a directive that the EPA cannot make any rules based on science that it is unwilling to release to the public. The era of “secret science” is over, at least for now.

There are more good things happening at the EPA besides these. But just knowing about these three changes ought to assure the reader that improvement in government can and does happen from time to time. Kudos to Scott Pruitt for his work at the EPA.

Gender Dysphoria Deserves Better than Transgender Politics

I have a dear friend who suffers from gender dysphoria. The inner pain he experiences, and the level of struggle he maintains just to function day to day breaks my heart. I will give no identifying details to protect him from bullies. Some goad him to live as the opposite sex. Some ridicule him because he once did. Often the same bully does both.

He is capable and smart. He knows, full-well, that he is a man who can never become a woman. Nor does he claim to know what a woman feels, he only knows his own feelings. They are the feelings of a man who experiences an irrational, yet overwhelming dissociation from his own embodiment.

I can describe it, but I can’t imagine what it is like. I do not experience it myself. Neither does the vast majority of the population — including the army of transactivists and social justice warriors who are pushing him to live as a woman. It is important to emphasize this point. Transactivists rarely suffer gender dysphoria themselves, nor do they represent people with gender dysphoria. Activists represent only activists.





Rose McGowen, Transactivist

My friend does not need activists who only imagine they know how he feels. He needs people who care enough to know him personally. He doesn’t need psychologists who assert without proof that a “physical transition” will help him, or surgeons who are willing to take his money knowing full-well they can never make him a female. He needs doctors who are competent enough to give him effective and long-term help.

There is more than enough scientific, medical and psychological literature on gender dysphoria, and enough long-term research to know that surgical and chemical attempts to alter the body ultimately fail as treatments. Not only do they fail, they are highly dangerous. Among those who surgically or chemically alter their bodies the suicide rate spikes to 19.1 times the overall population.

That’s not a 19% increase, but 1,910% increase. This appallingly high suicide rate cannot be dismissed as the result of societal stigma or disapproval. The study was conducted in Sweden, where cosmetic surgery to conform the body to a more feminine, or masculine, appearance has long been accepted.

We may disagree about almost everything else, but can’t we still agree that suicide is a negative outcome that we should all be working to avoid? The fact that there are people desperate enough to cut off perfectly functioning organs and spend tens of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgeries speaks to how deeply they are hurting. The fact that such surgeries do not decrease the suicide risk, but may actually increase it, speaks to how desperately they need real solutions rather than wishful thinking.


Dr. Paul McHugh, Johns-Hopkins

It is inexpressibly sad that real solutions are being denied my friend. If he had been born a decade earlier, or, likely, a few years in the future he would be benefiting from the scientific studies that caused Johns-Hopkins to offer better solutions than failed attempts at cosmetic surgery and hormones designed for a different body.

But like the lobotomy craze of the 1940s, countless people are being permanently scarred by medical procedures that the next generation will regard as quackery. They will be stunned to find that people as learned as Professor Deanna Adkins of Duke University solemnly swore that, “chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, [and] external genitalia,” are “counter to medical science.”

That’s akin to saying that rocks, sediments and fossils are counter to geological science. Apart from these, what alternative empirical evidence exists? Adkins never answers this question. Neither does she cite any evidence for her claim. Transactivists dress up their dogma in scientific language, but it’s pure ideology.

It was not new scientific discoveries that caused the American Psychiatric Association, in 2013, to remove references to “gender identity disorder” from their basic treatment manual, DSM-5. Rather, it was politicization of the APA and behind-the-scenes power plays that substituted ideology for proven science.

This false ideology is now showing up in Wyoming higher education. Transactivists proposed to the Board of Trustees at Eastern Wyoming College two new policies which will make it harder for real people with gender dysphoria to get help.

Claiming to create a “work environment free from discrimination,” the proposed “Transgender Employment Policy” (Board Policy 3.27), proscribes any speech or action challenging the idea that surgical, chemical or cosmetic alterations to a person’s body are the best way to care for those with gender dysphoria.

There are no policies that forbid blasphemy or vulgarity in the work place. But these prescribe pronouns and punish gender-heretics. They deny academic freedom and threaten the careers of any faculty or staff who continue to research, speak or write about the best science available concerning gender identity. Lectures, articles and social media, on- or off-campus, can bring the censure of the HR department. Censorship is real.

The real tragedy is that these measures effectively block people with gender dysphoria from hearing about more effective treatment. A policy that requires the wholesale embrace of radical surgery, hormone blockers, and various non-FDA-approved treatments as a condition for continued employment, creates a hostile working environment for everyone, the very opposite of its stated purpose.

The policy adopts the ideologically driven term “sex assigned at birth.” Medicine and science has never thought that sex is “assigned” at birth, or any other time. Sex is a reality from the moment of conception. It is discovered, not assigned. If it were otherwise, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the ACLU would not have mobilized in more than a dozen states to defeat legislation protecting females from sex-select abortion prior to birth.

Nevertheless, despite retractions of the infamous “Dear Colleague Letter” by the US Departments of Education and Justice, the EWC policy proposes to allow access to male and female restrooms and locker-room facilities based on something other than maleness of femaleness.

Sex-differentiated restrooms exist to guard modesty and protect bodies. If that’s no longer their purpose, we should remove all signs from restroom doors. At least that would maintain truth in advertising.

Women entering non-specified locker-rooms could know ahead of time that men might be inside. But to say one thing on the door and another thing in policy abuses not only language, but women. Sensitivity to gender dysphoria should not be insensitive to the human need for privacy, safety and dignity.

The proposed policy also directs the Human Resources office to “update official personnel records to reflect the employee’s new gender and name after a transitioning employee has fully transitioned.” But “full transition” is as elusive as a unicorn.

Every medical doctor knows that no matter how many organs are removed from a body, or how many cosmetic alterations are made to a person’s appearance, a male cannot become a female, and a female cannot become a male.

Not only is this true from a medical standpoint, but even the policies themselves testify to this fact. Dealing with “Transgender Student Athletic Participation,” Board Policy 5.14 discriminates between a “male-to-female (MTF) transgender student-athlete,” and a “female-to-male (FTM) transgender student athlete.” If a person were truly able to “fully transition,” such discrimination would be simultaneously impossible and unjust.

In writing a policy intended to teach that surgical “full transition” is possible, one wonders if the activists ever considered what they are saying to men and women who have unwillingly lost sexual organs. These people are being taught the false and outrageous message that such surgeries have made them less than men or women.

Confused and self-contradictory transgender policy proposals damage academic freedom, create a hostile work environment and unfairly disadvantage student athletes. Worst of all, they misinform students, staff or faculty who suffer from gender dysphoria and interfere with their rights to find the most effective help. Policy makers would do well to study the latest scholarship on transgenderism, rather than be bullied into adopting an ideology that is rapidly unraveling.

A good place to begin is the comprehensive study by Dr. Ryan Anderson, titled: “When Harry Met Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” An informed discussion of these matters would be a step forward for higher education, rather than a return to the outdated notions of the 1970s.