Well, I’ve just finished watching the Kansas City Chiefs win another Super Bowl, and it was a tad boorish of them to go to overtime, so I couldn’t start my column for an extra half hour on Sunday night. It is possible, I suppose, they were not thinking about my needs, but congratulations to them on a great season.

As one does while watching the big game, I was paging through the Colorado Politics website and reading the Out West Roundup, wherein I always find out about very interesting things going on out here that might not make the national news wire.

But first, I do need to say a thing or two about our current very odd presidential primary season, but I promise I’ll be brief (Editor: good). Though the seemingly oddly unbalanced report on President Joe Biden’s prior hanging on to six classified documents was quite harsh, it did not focus on Biden’s immediate self-reporting of the finds, as contrasted with former President Donald Trump’s returning of some of the classified docs he took, followed by his assurance none were left, until the FBI raided his home and found hundreds of highly classified documents in bathrooms, ballrooms and other insecure storage. At least President Biden put his half-dozen out in the garage like a normal American guy. But in fairness, Biden only needed a file folder to hold all his stuff, whereas the FBI found Trump had kept an additional 15 boxes, including 197 classified documents, including 30 that were top-secret.

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But balance is a tricky thing. For example, have you noticed the complete absence of Mrs. Trump from the campaign trail? Not exactly supporting her hubby, but that is OK, or rather it was kind of OK, until Trump brazenly went after fellow Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for her husband not being around to support her.

You know why he’s not around?

Well, he is Major Michael Haley of the South Carolina Army National Guard, and he is currently deployed to the Horn of Africa. He’s not on the campaign trail because he is on a military mission, for Pete’s sake.

Heck, even President Biden backed Haley and bashed Trump, saying “this guy wouldn’t know service to his country if it slapped him in the face.” But I’m sure Mrs. Trump is absent, not because she is fed up with her nutty husband, but rather for some other national service like Major Haley, right?

Oh, and remember how Trump declared himself the greatest American president (even better than Abraham Lincoln, he insisted)? Well, recall he based that claim on the markets hitting their then- highest levels in history. Heck, back in 2019, Fox News ran a story supporting the greatest president theory based on the markets.

Well, guess what? Under Biden, the markets have reached even higher levels than under Trump. I’m quite sure soon Fox News will run a story, to be fair and balanced, naming Biden the new greatest president ever. I guess I lied about being brief (Ed: yup).

But I’m not going to talk about that…

Instead, let’s turn to the aforementioned Out West Roundup. We learn in Montana federal officials rejected requests from a variety of environmental groups to restore various protections of wolves. For people, like me for example, who seek to be ardent environmentalists, that decision seemed odd. But the reasoning is the wolves have been more successful than expected, and that is good news. The wolves don’t qualify for special protection because they are not technically endangered anymore. Though I’ll always want proof, if this decision is based on sound science, it is a victory, not a defeat.

I also want to draw your attention to a story out of Utah, where the far-right Republicans who have dominated that state for decades and are again showing, in the face of lots of far more critically important issues, that they spent time passing a new law that forbids anyone from using a bathroom reserved for any gender other than is listed on the person’s birth certificate.

It isn’t clear if we are now required to carry our birth certificates when peeing in Utah. I remain flummoxed by those who worry trans people are secretly lying about their gender issues so they can pop into the “wrong” bathroom and do terrible things. This is a position that’s both heartless and ignorant, in that it clearly demonstrates these folks don’t understand what it means to be trans.

It is similar to a GOP bill I saw proposed some years ago that worried that some men, seeking to sexually assault women, would dress up as women so they could sneak into the ladies room. The bill seemed to believe, first of all, such violent cross-dressing men exist in large numbers and are patrolling the bathrooms of Tennessee. Second, they seem to believe someone who’s intent on a violent attack would be dissuaded by the “women” sign on the door and would therefore give up, rather than just wait till the possible victim left.

I know these are touchy issues, and I likely have offended some readers. But that, dear readers, is the cost of living in a free and open republic. I’ve so often heard those on the far-right crow about freedom and their allegedly earnest desire to extend fundamental freedoms to all, unless they offend the GOPers in some way by how they dress or whom they date.

For those far-righters, let me give you some news that might make you feel better: folks who identify as trans, for example, do so not to claim some glory our society bestows. Quite the opposite. These folks have lived lives that didn’t fit and coming out for anyone on the LGBTQI spectrum is rarely, if ever, an action that makes life easier to live rather than more difficult.

Frankly, I don’t care who might be standing next to me in a restroom. If it is a person who identifies as a man, that’s fine with me. I have far more worrisome things to contend with, like how a once noble political party has come to be wholly owned by a thrice married serial adulterer and business cheat who ran a fake university, sold fake steaks and stole hundreds of classified documents.

I’ll leave it to others to obsess about who is going in what bathrooms.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.