There was nothing relaxing about a trip to Los Angeles’s upscale Wi Spa last Saturday. The ordinarily calm atmosphere was interrupted by a bitter protest over the shop’s transgender policy, which allowed a man to expose himself in the women’s locker room — to the shock and disgust of female clients. In a video that exploded across social media, an irate customer demanded to know why it’s okay “for a man to go into the women’s section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls, underage? Your spa, Wi Spa, condones that? He is a man. He is not a woman!”

“There are girls down there,” the woman said angrily, “other women who are highly offended by what they just saw — and you did nothing. You sided with him!” The employees on the desk said that they couldn’t discriminate against the man based on his “gender identity.” That infuriated other customers in the lobby — including one who can be heard demanding a refund, vowing never to return. When the footage started getting hundreds of thousands of views, the spa released a statement, insisting its hands were tied by the state. “As a spa located in Los Angeles, Wi Spa complies with California law prohibiting discrimination by a business… Wi Spa strives to meet the needs and safety of all of its customers and does not tolerate harassment or lewd conduct by any customer, regardless of their sex, gender, or other characteristic.”

You could’ve fooled the locals. To the people demonstrating in front of Wi Spa on Saturday, it looked exactly like the store was tolerating lewd conduct. And yet, what started out as a peaceful protest over the store’s refusal to protect its customers turned ugly when counter-protestors, carrying rainbow flags and transgender signs, decided to get in the faces of concerned men and women. Suddenly, the chants of “save our children” were drowned out by a crazed mob who started setting fire to dumpsters and chasing opponents down the streets.

The chaos only escalated from there, as fights started breaking out up and down the sidewalk. At least one man wearing an “Obey Jesus” t-shirt stepped in to protect the women in his group and was punched in the head and back until the blood poured down his face. Others, wearing the tagline “Let’s talk about Jesus,” were pushed into the street while the mob threw water bottles at their heads. By the time police arrived, things were so out of hand that they had to form a line and clear the area. At least one person was hospitalized, and another five crimes of assault and battery were reported, according to the LAPD officers on the scene.

And this is the “progress” Joe Biden wants to bring to every locker room in America? A wide-open door for men and boys to traumatize our daughters? In the name of tolerance, he’s pushing schools to throw children’s privacy to the wind and cast their lot with radical transgender policies like this one. If that makes you or your child uncomfortable, this president’s response is “too bad.” Even now, Biden’s Office of Civil Rights is making it clear that in cases like the Wi Spa, where a naked man walks around in front of children in the women’s locker room, he’s the one who could file a complaint for harassment. And this administration would side with him every time.

Of course, the other side will scream that this sort of incident is an anomaly. An outlier. But a representative of another local spa on Olympic Boulevard says this sort of problem has cropped up there too. A biological man who identified as a woman caused “an uproar” last year when he exposed himself in the female pools and lockers. “People began to feel uncomfortable,” the employee explained. “It became very disruptive.” According to the LA Times magazine, the management did confront him. His response? “He was adamant that the spa should ‘attempt to normalize young girls and women viewing male genitalia.’”

Unfortunately, Americans are living under an administration that agrees with him. And look at where that’s gotten us! Six months into Biden’s “unity” agenda, fights are breaking out from spas to school boards. If the president doesn’t step back and reconsider where his policies are taking this nation, these next three and a half years will test the endurance of the very fiber of our nation.

Originally published here.

Squad Dems: A Fourth to Be Reckoned With

Squad member Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) used the anniversary of America’s Independence to parrot the 1619 Project’s claims about continued racial oppression and fundamental injustice. She tweeted, “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.” This is a textbook example of the 1619 Project’s false narrative of American history. America elected a black president in 2008, vice president in 2020, and many members of Congress, including Cori Bush herself. “Black Lives Matter,” an organization with nothing but its name to recommend it, raised $90 million in one year. Not to mention America’s many popular and successful black athletes, musicians, entertainers, scholars, and entrepreneurs.

In 1852, before America fought a bloody civil war to end the evils of slavery, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in which he rebuked his audience for failing to achieve the “great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence.” If you believe Cori Bush, all that blood was shed for nothing because blacks still aren’t free. Bush treats the Declaration of Independence as empty rhetoric, by and for the benefit of powerful white men only. They interpret the line, “all men are created equal” to describe a present equality of condition, despite no evidence the Framers meant that.

Abraham Lincoln, who improved the condition of blacks in America more than any other American — certainly more than Ms. Bush — explained: “They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them… They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed to this same idea, calling “the magnificent words” of the Declaration “a promissory note” applying to “black men as well as white men.” He based his plea for equality in civil rights on the Declaration itself, concluding, “so we have come to cash this check.”

The Declaration of Independence provided the moral force for the movements that ended slavery and segregation, but the woke Left has indoctrinated our children against their own country, so that only 36 percent of adults aged 18-24 are proud to be American. They’ve intimidated patriotic Americans in the public sphere so even Olympic athletes are disrespecting the flag. Someone asked Bush, “How much more freedom are you looking for?” She responded, “WE are the experts on our own liberation. And we won’t stop until it’s won.”

Bush presented an abbreviated litany of euphemisms for her Left-wing policy agenda: letting criminals out of prison, drug legalization, police defunding, socialized medicine, racist housing policies, discrimination against private schools, and the abolition of private property (implied in her expression, “stolen land”). And that’s always been the point. Why is the radical Left force-feeding America a false narrative about our racist founding that reinterprets selective facts through the (racist) lens of critical race theory? Not so that we will heal our past racial divides and move forward as a nation. Rather, so they can ram a radical policy agenda through the chasm of racial strife they create.

Patriotic Americans are growing wise to the con, which is why parents, soldiers, businessmen, and everyday citizens are rising up to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend the land of freedom we hold dear.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.