The Patriot Post® · North Carolina's Bathroom Wars
The North Carolina legislature is under immense scrutiny for overruling a Charlotte city ordinance that, come April 1, would have forced businesses to give transgender people special admission privileges in selecting dressing and restroom facilities. Talk about an April Fools’ joke.
Predictably, the Leftmedia’s bias is showing. According to CBS News, “The law Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed last week requires people to use multi-stall bathrooms that match their birth certificates at state agencies, schools and universities, even if that means forcing transgender people with heavy beards to use women’s rooms and putting people with feminine appearances in men’s rooms.” Quite frankly, this isn’t about placating the demands of “transgender people with heavy beards” or “people with feminine appearances.” It’s about protecting the wellbeing of otherwise healthy children. Besides, the law doesn’t say a man who undergoes surgery to remove his manhood can’t change his birth certificate.
That America is even having this debate is absurd, but even more fatuous is the angst it’s giving so-called LGBT pacifiers.
We begin with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who announced he intends not to honor the law and, in fact, to refuse to defend it against any challenge. According to Cooper, “Not only is this new law a national embarrassment, it will set North Carolina’s economy back if we don’t repeal it.”
That prompted Gov. McCrory to fire back, “When you are the state’s lawyer, you are a lawyer first and a politician second. Therefore, I encourage the Attorney General to reconsider his flawed logic. I am fulfilling my oath of office and we expect him to do the same.” He’s right. But just like the Obama Justice Department — which is constitutionally tasked with defending Rule of Law — declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, don’t expect much oath-keeping in the North Carolina AG’s office.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee have signed directives prohibiting government employees from visiting North Carolina on the taxpayers’ dime. Cuomo declared, “As long as there is a law in North Carolina that creates the grounds for discrimination against LGBT people, I am barring non-essential state travel to that state.”
There are myriad issues at play here. Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson calls the blowback “textbook cultural cronyism” and explains that, under the bill’s terms, “private schools, restaurants, stores, and businesses are free to establish whatever bathroom policies they’d like, but that access to government bathrooms will be determined primarily by biological sex.” That’s hardly what we would call “unfair,” but it’s precisely why leftists are deliberately misrepresenting the law as discriminatory. In their minds, the only “fair” law is one that subordinates our natural rights to their agenda. Anderson goes on to make this astute observation:
> The NBA has said North Carolina’s law might make it move the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte. The NBA threat over the All-Star Game is particularly amusing. The NBA (and its sister organization, the WNBA) apparently think bathroom access shouldn’t be based on biology, but basketball leagues should. The NBA and WNBA, of course, are free to have gender-neutral basketball teams — and to have gender-neutral bathrooms at those games. That they are threatening the state to impose a policy that even they haven’t voluntarily adopted is the height of hypocrisy.
Giving further credence to one of the fundamental arguments conservatives have made against placating transgender individuals, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins writes: “[E]ntire companies are threatening to pull out of the state because Governor McCrory refused to risk the safety of his entire state for less than one half of one percent of the country’s population. And, it turns out, he may have done more to protect the people who identify as transgendered than most liberals have. Just this week, a transgendered woman was raped in one of these new unisex bathrooms — at an LGBT landmark no less. At the Stonewall Inn in New York City, the liberals’ monument to ‘tolerance,’ one of their own was attacked. Even here, at this bastion of sexual confusion, these policies are hurting the people they were designed to ‘help!’” Considering most students struggling with transgenderism eventually move on, the question has to be asked: What’s the objective? Perkins adds:
> According to the American College of Pediatricians, the Left’s agenda is child abuse! The harms of this gender ideology, which the ACP lays out … in its statement of opposition, can destroy a person for life. What sends the wrong message are policies that try to keep children frozen in this fleeting phase of uncertainty. A full 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls “eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.”
North Carolina got this one right, and other states should take note. The best way conservatives can respond is by emulating Gov. McCrory and forge ahead amid intense opposition — and there will be much of it from the Rainbow Mafia. As Anderson says, “What Americans need now is strong political leadership to stand up to the cronyist bullying and do what’s best for the American people.” That takes principled steadfastness. Are you listening, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal?