DAVID MARCUS: The Gray Lady grows a spine - and faces down a mass activist tantrum

200 New York Times contributors must be absolutely gobsmacked. They staged the perfect tantrum. And it didn't work!

This week, an undistinguished, largely nameless group of pseudo-journalists and activists penned an open letter to the Times decrying the paper's coverage of the transgender issue.

Like a kid kicking and screaming on the supermarket linoleum, they must have expected mommy to come running with a lollypop to make it all better.

No doubt these keyboard crusaders were confident the Gray Lady would buckle to wokeness - as it always has – fire the offending reporters, shutdown any thoughtful discussion of one of the greatest medical, cultural, and societal issues of this generation, and crawl across broken glass begging for their forgiveness.

But shockingly, that didn't happen.

The Times told the letter writers to go pound sand.

Mommy has had enough. It's going to take years of therapy to get over this.

The protest letter itself, along with a second from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, were nonsensical. The letter-writers were apoplectic over two recent articles.

One piece observed sincere fears over irreversible medical treatment for children. The other gave voice to parents whose kids had been secretly encouraged by public schools to experiment with gender transition.

Seems important, no?

The tantrum-notes made typical demands.

200 New York Times contributors must be absolutely gobsmacked. They staged the perfect tantrum. And it didn't work!

GLAAD parked a mobile billboard outside The New York Times' offices in Manhattan on Wednesday

The Times editors must meet with trans leaders and hire trans editors, but what the screeds were really saying was: Shut up about this topic.

And amazingly, in this day and age, the leadership at the Times seems to have borrowed a backbone.

A spokesperson for the paper responded, writing, 'We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.'

You think?

Then on Thursday, the Times heaped injury atop the insult of ignoring the activists' demands by running an opinion editorial defending trans-ideology critic and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Outrage abounded yet again! The absurdly named Human Rights Campaign, a clown car of an organization, moaned that Rowling had, get this, 'incorporated transphobic plots into her mystery novels.' Grab the fainting couch.

Mind you, when Beyonce performs a concert in Dubai, in a country that has criminalized homosexuality, there wasn't so much as a peep from the so-called Human Rights Campaign.

This is a major moment for the New York Times, but why this moment?

It was not long ago that New York Times opinion editor James Bennet lost his job for running a perfectly sensible column by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who suggested the U.S. military be deployed to suppress destructive BLM protests.

The wokest of the woke in the newsroom absolutely erupted. 'Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger' New York Times' staffers tweeted. Words are violence, they screamed. And a trembling leadership gave in to the cackling newsroom agitators.

Well now, the Times is beating back the monster they've created.

Forgive me a moment of schadenfreude. As we say, welcome to what the right has been dealing with for a decade.

But why did a newspaper that regularly caves to the asylum inmates suddenly decide to stand up to them?

Is the difference here that — as opposed to BLM madness or climate catastrophe hysteria — even the liberals at the New York Times have kids?

Is it that sickening evidence of potential malpractice in the administration of transgender therapies are too glaring to ignore?

European countries, from the United Kingdom to Sweden to France, have shut down or heavily restricted gender-affirming care treatments in recent years.

Now, why would they do that? Ron DeSantis isn't the governor of Burgundy.

Even New York Magazine, an outlet so far to the left that it strains peripheral vision, came out against the aggrieved authors of the letters.

Columnist Jonathan Chait rightly points to major questions about whether kids put on hormone blockers are being properly screened.

We must talk about that, even if deranged activists scream that any discussion of it is literal violence against the trans community.

Yes, the anti-free speech gestapo has finally gone too far.

It's hard not to get the sense that the woke fever in liberal journalism is, if not broken, at least coming down a bit. Honestly, there could be no greater harbinger of sanity for our society.

A new survey from Gallup shows that a majority of Americans not only believe that the news media misleads them, but that they do it intentionally.

Maybe, just maybe, the top brass of the paper of record is realizing how dangerous and unsustainable such a situation is. Maybe they are starting to understand that packaging the news like a DNC press release is destroying their brand and the country.

(Above) Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets of Manhattan to participate on the Reclaim Pride Coalition's fourth annual Queer Liberation in March of 2022

The motto of the New York Times is 'all the news that's fit to print,' but the scribes of the ludicrous letter would change that to 'all the news that advances our agenda.'

Sorry, our society will no longer be held hostage by this gobbledygook.

Girls' sports, men in women's prisons, shelters, and locker rooms, and yes, children being mutilated, many of whom come to regret it, are topics that need to be talked about.

And dare we hope that this newfound courage in the face of the progressive mob might extend to other major issues of the day?

How about Biden family corruption, the evidence of which piles higher in front of our eyes daily, or the pernicious green energy push that cripples the poor by making fossil fuels more expensive, or maybe racist critical race theory curricula in schools or racist Diversity, Equity and Inclusion departments in our governments, universities, and corporations?

Good for the New York Times for standing up for truth and good journalism - better late than never as the old saying goes.

There are lessons in this: Do not be bullied by the woke mob, speak the truth and demand it from the mainstream news media.

And above all else, remember: We are the adults – tantrums are for children.