The Patriot Post® · Anything You Can Sue, I Can Sue Better!
According to the Obama administration, the biggest threat facing America isn’t ISIS. It isn’t even a nuclear Iran. It’s the stick figures on the bathroom door. While the rest of the world watches wildfires torch through Canada, or millions of Christians flee the Middle East borders, President Obama and his out-of-touch ideologues aren’t worried about genocide. They’re too focused with gender-cide: the elimination of the sexes.
[Monday], the White House’s eight year bed-and-bath legacy took another twist when the Justice Department decided to join in the parade of North Carolina lawsuits with one of its own against Governor Pat McCrory’s (R) state. Frustrated that the Tar Heels beat her to the punch, Justice Secretary Loretta Lynch held a press conference in an obvious PR move to compete with the headlines about North Carolina’s pushback. Proving just how detached the agency is from reality (and how quickly it moves on things not named Hillary Clinton’s emails), Lynch bragged that DOJ officials saw this as a major priority for the administration, admitting that they’d spent “many hours” on the issue and plan to spend “many more.”
As part of the Obama administration’s radical rewrite of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, she alleges that “an individual’s ‘sex’ consists of multiple factors, which may not always be in alignment.” In a long rambling speech that liberals cheered as the modern equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (more like a nightmare), the secretary tried to compare the march of the gender-confused to the era of Jim Crow. That’s a ridiculous comparison, many would agree, since race — like gender — is assigned at birth. No one can wake up and “feel” African American because they desire a certain scholarship or membership. Still, Lynch went on, “It speaks to all of us who have ever been made to feel inferior — like somehow we just don’t belong in our community, like somehow we just don’t fit in. Let me reassure every transgender individual, right here in America, that you belong just as you are.”
Let’s be clear: This debate has never been about eliminating the non-existent rights of gender-confused, it’s about the rights to privacy of the other 99.5 percent of the public. The idea of safety isn’t about fearing people who identify as transgender. It’s about not trusting those who would exploit the law by pretending to be one! At one of the many organized protests outside Target stores (which now have the policy the federal government is trying to force on the rest of America), one mom warned that there are as many as 209 registered sex offenders within a five-mile radius of the Utah store they were picketing. Mississippi dad Johnny Brekeen put it this way: “I’m not saying that a transgender would harm a child. What I’m saying is if men are allowed to go into the restroom, children are going to be harmed.”
The truth is, there are several possible solutions to the administration’s “complaint.” But a solution isn’t what liberals are looking for. Complete capitulation is. In the clash between “gender identity” and privacy, like the clash between sexual orientation and religious liberty, accommodation is not the end goal of this president. This is about advancing an agenda, not following the law or finding a compromise. As Lynch said: “This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms.” On that we agree. It’s about executive overreach, state’s rights, lawlessness, public safety, hypocrisy, policy priorities, and ideological extortion.
Speaking of hypocrisy, state leader Phil Berger points out plenty of it in the second lawsuit filed by North Carolina. For starters, this facilities free-for-all is a policy that even the DOJ doesn’t follow when it comes to the prison system. “Never mind that the Department’s policy, on its face, demands that North Carolina allow biologically male prison inmates who identify as females to take showers with biological female inmates, which, besides being absurd and dangerous, also violates the Department’s own federal prison regulations.” He goes on, “Moreover, such a policy would likely provoke a public outcry demanding that single-sex facilities be abandoned altogether and replaced with single-user bathroom, shower, and locker facilities. That, in turn, would likely force the plaintiffs and other members of the General Assembly to authorize funding to retrofit countless public buildings, at a taxpayer cost of hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars.” All to placate less than one half of one percent of the population!
The absurdity of it all, especially as it pertains to children, is not lost on Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (R). Like Palatine, Illinois, the Fort Worth Independent School District is blasting the local superintendent for “unilaterally adopting ‘Transgender Student Guidelines’” without any discussion with parents or board members. Among other things, the rules order teachers to use the “name and pronoun” preferred by the student; encourage schools to facilitate gender transitions with or without their parents’ involvement; allow the student to use the restroom of his/her choice; open athletic teams to anyone, regardless of their biological sex. “Every parent, especially those of young girls, should be outraged. I call upon the parents within the Fort Worth ISD to take immediate steps to repeal this stealthy scheme and remove Dr. Scribner from his post,” Patrick said in a statement.
Originally published here.
Liberal Bias: It’s Academic
These days, there’s nothing surprising about the liberal bias on college campuses. But it is surprising when a liberal admits it. In The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof stunned plenty of his colleagues by outing academia for the proving ground of progressive bias. His column, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” was a candid look at the lack of intellectual diversity in education today, and how — in censoring or marginalizing the conservative views — the Left was shunning the diversity it supposedly champions. “We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and Muslims at the table — so long as they aren’t conservatives.”
To support his theory, he highlights a handful of surveys of university campuses that show it’s easier to find a Marxist professor of the social sciences than a Republican professor of the humanities. In the English Department alone, only two percent of faculty identity as conservative. That doesn’t come as a surprise to Dr. Carol Swain, who joined me [Monday] on “Washington Watch” to talk about her personal run-in with the progressive mafia. As an African-American woman, she was threatened, protested, and verbally abused for exposing students to other views in one of academia’s elite laboratories of radicalism. And what are these offensive views? That radical Islam — the same extremism that toppled the World Trade Centers — is a grave threat to the American way of life.
Apparently, this offended students’ delicate sensibilities and resulted in a campus-wide firestorm. Among other things, students accuse Carol of expressing hatred toward minorities — which is ridiculous because she is a minority! On the show, she said she understood why someone like sociologist George Yancey would say that he faced more problems as a Christian inside academia than he did as a black man outside it. Thankfully, the petition to fire Dr. Swain from her position at Vanderbilt failed, and she’s back at work encouraging intellectual diversity on campus — and in her new book, Who’s Stealing Our Kids?
Originally published here.
July Fireworks over GOP Platform?
There may not be a contested convention in Cleveland, but will there be a contested platform? That’s what most Republicans are wondering heading into the party’s biggest election event in July. Now that Donald Trump has all but sewn up the GOP nomination, the attention now turns to the only looming question: is the GOP platform secure in the hands of a man who has had his own share of evolving positions on key issues? While Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) continues to mobilize delegates to head to Ohio in July with the goal of safeguarding the party’s values, many have painted it as an “anti-Trump” effort.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people, including myself, have no idea what Donald will do once the RNC hands over the keys to the nomination. Sending conservatives to Cleveland to protect the core principles of the Republican Party is a precautionary move, not a rebellious one. As in every other election cycle, the platform is an anchor that helps tether the nominees to the core conservative principles that have long been at the heart of the GOP. And while there may be a greater emphasis on the platform, hopefully, there will not be greater debate. But if there is, conservatives will be prepared. When it comes to our defending our guiding principles, we will not yield.
Originally published here.