Back in the 1990s, I was a Sunday school teacher, a member of my parish council, a small-business owner, and a leader in my sons’ Cub Scout pack. I even put in a year coaching five-year-olds in soccer, though what I knew about the sport could have been penned on a “Sticky Note,” one of the small ones.

But I’ve never carried as many labels and titles as I do right now.

With no effort on my part, I’m now branded a “white supremacist and a bigot,” an “insurrectionist and a terrorist,” a “toxic male,” a “Christian” as if that were a bad thing, and a “recessive genetic defect.” I’m sure our Moniker Makers have devised other tags for me, but I’m too lazy and uninterested to look for them.

Obviously, I am qualified for the reeducation camps some have proposed for people of my ilk. If those camps include medical and dental care, a decent library, access to a computer, and a nightly glass or two of chardonnay, then sign me up. I’d enjoy the company of like-minded patriots.

Now for some rebuttals to these charges.

I just looked in the mirror, a major sacrifice on my part, and discovered I am not white. Instead, my face is a palette of various shades of pink, a consequence of age, sunshine, and alcohol.

So am I then a “pink supremacist”? Not really. You see, I believe that anyone who feels superior to others because of skin pigmentation is an idiot. It’s like saying, “I’m better than you because I’m wearing Gucci jeans.”

On Jan. 6, I attended a rally in Washington D.C. to support Donald Trump. My party of 16—five adults and 11 adolescents—left after the speeches ended, yet now we are designated insurrectionists and terrorists. The most deadly weapon anyone in our group carried was a purse. And what about that shivering 11-year-old? Is he a terrorist?

I’m not quite sure I qualify as a “toxic male” because I have no idea what that means. Are all men toxic unless they behave more like women? And why do we go on bashing men anyway? There doesn’t seem to be a point to this chauvinism. Isn’t it time we moved on?

Yes, I am a Christian. While often weak in the practice of my faith, I am a believer. Should I then be deemed some kind of fanatic?

Most recently, I discovered I am a “recessive genetic defect.”

In an article discussing the radical direction being taken by so many of our public librarians, Eileen Toplansky includes this passage:

That librarians have committed to a known Marxist group such as BLM is most revealing and shocking. In fact, ‘a co-founder of BLM’s Toronto branch is a young woman named Yusra Khogali, who in late 2015 posted the following message on Facebook: “Whiteness is not humxness. in fact, white skin is sub-humxn[.] … White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual. white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.”’

As a lover of the English language, I find this post to be an abomination. Does this young woman not understand the most basic concepts of grammar? Perhaps I am displaying my “whiteness” by even asking the question.

More importantly, how is Khogali’s point of view not racist?  Exchange black and white in this post, and you would find yourself canceled and standing in an unemployment office after being fired from your job. And rightly so.

Yet on and on it goes, the never-ending racist game.

In “The Origin and True Agenda of ‘Anti-Racist’ Politics,” Edward Ring writes:

In every federal agency including the military, in corporate America including sports and entertainment, throughout the colleges and universities, and even down into the K-12 public schools, ‘woke’ ideology now permeates the culture. It is a seductive, divisive philosophy that emphasizes group conflict over individual competition and achievement. If it isn’t stopped, it will destroy everything that has made America great.

Like all the other labels mentioned above, “anti-racism” divides rather than unites, creates disharmony rather than eradicating it.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who is a hero to the civil rights movement, famously said that he hoped that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This is a right and worthy dream that prioritizes individual integrity rather than color or race. Today that idea seems almost quaint.

For those who smear entire groups with their labels of hate and lies, I have some news for you: Many of us are no longer listening.

As for me personally, I’ve thrown the tags you’ve tried to pin on me into the waste basket, poured another cup of coffee, and will greet the day wearing some other labels I dearly love: father, grandfather, American.