Ashley Fisher’s recent column on Indiana’s rather extraordinary new law intrigued me. If we were in a genuine police state or an “increasingly totalitarian society,” she would not have been able to publish an article like she did or would have been arrested and imprisoned immediately afterward.

Has that happened? Our society and our governments have many failings (I study them), but they are quite a distance from being a police state or totalitarian society.

She should probably do a little reading about Germany under Hitler or the Soviet Union under Stalin. Verbal inflation about politics is rampant in our society, but slinging around terms that aren’t accurate doesn’t do much to inform the public.

David Nice, WSU Professor Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs