Conservatives in Washington have not relented in their backlash against protections for transgender people. On Wednesday, the “Just Want Privacy” coalition, led by the Family Policy Institute of Washington (FPIW), filed a ballot initiative overturning the state’s regulations ensuring equal access to restrooms and other facilities…. This would be the first anti-transgender law advanced through a voter initiative, and it’s much more expansive than the South Dakota law Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) vetoed…. Gender identity has been protected under Washington nondiscrimination law since 2006, but it was only this past December that the Human Rights Commission issued rules about how it has played out. Lawmakers reacted by trying to introduce legislation countering the rules, but their efforts faltered. Several of these lawmakers have also indicated their support for the initiative effort.
When it comes to shepherding efforts to oppress and discriminate against those who are “different,” no group does it quite like Social Conservative culture warriors. If these Defenders of all that’s Good, Right, and Holy © had their way, America would be stuck in 1958. Unfortunately for them, we live in a much different world in 2016. Some folks just can’t seem to grasp the reality that people deserve to be able to live their lives openly and without reservation in the most honest and authentic way they can. This means that some people may live, love, think, and/or believe differently. That doesn’t make anyone bad or evil- just different. No one should have the right to judge others, much less force their narrow moral/theological/ideological agenda on those they consider “less than.”
For many Conservative culture warriors, “different” for them IS bad and evil. In their estimation, we should be doing everything possible to rid this great country of the influence of those who don’t pray to a Christian God or have sex exclusively in the missionary position- and they’ve been ordained by God to do just that.
The latest freakout among Conservative culture warriors involves which bathrooms transgender individuals should be allowed to use. Yep, these “small government” devotees have no problem with legislating about who gets to use what they consider the “correct” bathroom. The idea that transgender individuals should be allowed to use bathrooms corresponding with the gender they identify as is anathema to those willing to go to the barricades to protect the sanctity of our bathrooms and our children. More on that to come….
To this way of thinking, equal rights really ARE special rights, because the only REAL Americans worthy of equal treatment under the law are good, God-fearing, heterosexual White Christians. And, as REAL American knows, transgender individuals want nothing more than to SNEAK INTO THE WRONG BATHROOM AND MOLEST YOUR CHILDREN!!! Welcome to the scary, sexual predator-filled world of Just Want Privacy, an “educational organization” that’s just filed an initiative in Washington State designed to restrict the use of bathrooms to the gender reflecting the genitalia a person was born with. The initiative, or as I like to call it, the ONCE A PENIS-AMERICAN, ALWAYS A PENIS-AMERICAN © bill, is being pushed by those who don’t seem to have an honest bone in their bodies.
One of the Family Policy Institute of Washington’s allies, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has been pushing for similar anti-transgender bills across the country. Just this week, ADF counsel Samuel Green tried to stoke fears in Washington by recounting a recent story about a non-transgender man who trespassed in a women’s locker room at a public pool last month. In his Seattle Times op-ed Wednesday, he claimed that according to Seattle Parks and Recreation, “the man would not have been asked to leave if he had simply verbally identified as a woman.”
To make his case, Green had to totally ignore the clarifying memo issued last week by the Washington Human Rights Commission, which explained that the law would not protect the man who performed this stunt. In fact, the commission encouraged the pool to ask such a person to leave if it seemed he was there under false pretense — i.e. that he wasn’t actually transgender. Green is intentionally fearmongering by warning that the law forces women and girls to be exposed to male genitalia, when no evidence supports the claim.
That the culture warriors behind Just Want Privacy are willing to ignore facts, truth, and simple human decency in order to peddle their fear mongering and dishonesty is hardly surprising. It’s a tactic that recently worked in Houston, where Social Conservative culture warriors were successful in repealing the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which was designed to prohibit discrimination based on, among other things, sexual orientation. The idea of being required to treat others with equality, respect, and dignity was just too much for those who fear their public restrooms will be overrun with transgender perverts looking to prey upon their precious snowflakes.
That the risk of inappropriate sexual behavior from transgender individuals is actually very low matters not at all to those culture warriors for whom truth is what they can convince people to believe. The risk associated with non-transgendered males is actually far higher…but facts can be such messy, inconvenient things, knowhutimean??
Just Wants Privacy is merely the latest (fairly well financed and organized) effort to legislate hatred, bigotry, and exclusion. Unfortunately, in an election cycle in which Donald Trump has made racism, sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and the generalized desire to divide humanity into warring factions fashionable again, discriminating against transgender individuals seems almost normal.
How sick does a person have to be to focus so obsessively on bathrooms? Welcome the the world of Just Wants Privacy, in which honest and integrity have been strangled and left for dead by the side of the road. It’s not about bathrooms, or protecting children from predators, or any of the other straw men they’ll throw up. It’s about oppressing a minority class whom they feel to be “less than.” It’s pathetic, un-Christian, and anti-democratic…but when you believe America by rights belongs to people who look, act, think, believe, live, and love as you do, pathetic doesn’t begin to do justice to your depravity.
This sickness is beginning to spread; Tennessee is now considering legislation that will determine who gets to use what bathrooms- EXACTLY the sort of thing government should be doing, knowhutimean?? It’s all about “small government,” small enough to force your agenda into the bedrooms, medical offices, and classrooms from coast to coast.
This is what America has devolved into; the Founding Fathers would be SO proud….
