Serena’s blow for equality: behaving as badly as men

Was tennis star Serena Williams disciplined excessively by the umpire for her tantrum at the U.S. Open the other day? She and others say it was sex discrimination because men players have gotten away with worse.

The umpire who disciplined Williams seems to be stricter than most and only a careful study of professional tennis umpiring may settle the matter.

But even if the umpire was tougher with Williams than he would have been with a man, Williams’ complaint will be weak as long as two wrongs don’t make a right. Everyone who plays organized sports encounters bad umpiring, and while it can alter the game, it is still part of the game and players always have to play a bit better to guard against it.

Good sportsmanship calls for restraint from players in such circumstances. This doesn’t mean that bad calls can’t be questioned, but it rejects the screaming, insults, and equipment smashing committed by Williams, responses that rightfully can result in the immediate ejection of ordinary players in ordinary sporting events, whatever their gender.

But maybe today it is considered progress for prominent and successful women to claim the right to behave as disgracefully as men. Maybe young people don’t already have enough bad examples.

Legislators as locusts: Announcing recently that he will challenge the state Senate’s majority leader, Bob Duff of Norwalk, to lead the chamber’s Democratic caucus, New Haven state Sen. Gary Winfield alluded to the socialist trend in the party.

“There’s a feeling that we don’t always know where we are going, what is at the core of what we are doing,” Winfield said. “We need to be more clear about how progressive we are.”

But it’s not hard for anyone paying a little attention to Connecticut’s public life to discover how “progressive” the Democratic Senate caucus is. Among other things, the Democratic senators believe that everything desirable should be free — that is, paid for by someone other than its recipients — and that state law should require the unskilled to be paid as much as the skilled, without regard to the value actually produced by the unskilled labor.

This kind of “progressive” thinking has its appeal. It also has its consequences — the steady decline of Connecticut’s economy. It is as “progressive” as a plague of locusts in a field of wheat.

Liberals for war profits: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist insurgent who recently defeated a veteran U.S. representative in a Democratic primary in a district in New York City, has a fair question. Why is affordability always doubted for the free stuff the political left wants for “social programs” but never for the stupid imperial wars the United States is always waging?

A better question might be why supposedly liberal Democratic members of Congress, like Connecticut’s, keep supporting those wars, like the war in Afghanistan.

This year’s Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, became famous in 2006 by running against the war in Iraq and defeating U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman for the Democratic nomination for senator. But the war in Afghanistan is continuing into its 17th year and neither Lamont nor any leading Connecticut Democrat even notices the bloodshed and expense.

Connecticut’s supposedly liberal Democrats may condone perpetual war because the state has big military contractors and questions could get in the way of that business.

How “progressive” of them!