Thursday, May 12, 2016

Restroom Wars

It's come to this:

The left, always in search of old traditions and moral boundaries to smash as they go about the business of destroying the country and culture, has taken up the cause of mandating that biological males be permitted into women's rest rooms. That sounds crazy enough to most sane people, but the rationale for it, and who's voicing the rationale, is stunning.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has delivered herself of the opinion that laws excluding from women's rest rooms men who see themselves as women are like the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks out of white establishments. This is so looney that only an Obama official could have come up with it.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch
The Federalist has a staff editorial explaining just some of the looniness of Lynch's position. Here are some of the salient points:
After North Carolina refused to drop the law [excluding members of one sex from restrooms designated for the opposite sex] because the Obama administration said so, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday that the DOJ would take the state to court. According to the DOJ’s lawsuit, the law (HB 2) “constitutes a pattern or practice of employment discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Yuuuuuup. The DOJ is completely convinced that barring a grown man claiming to be a woman from entering the same public locker room as your vulnerable school-aged daughter is just like the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation and perpetuated the racist notion that blacks and whites were genetically distinct.

DOJ’s new rationale is especially curious given that so-called trans advocates have claimed for years that sex and gender are distinct notions, and that one’s gender need not have any relation to one’s biological sex. The term “gender identity” was invented as a way of describing this particular delusion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, does not mention gender. It mentions only sex, which is determined exclusively by one’s chromosomal makeup. As of today, though, DOJ has apparently once again decided that gender and sex are totally the same thing.
What matters is not the subjective view one has of oneself. What matters is the objective anatomical accoutrements one carries about. If one has male parts one should be restricted to male restrooms regardless of whether one thinks of oneself as male or female.
Comparing the transgender agenda to racial equality seems to be a favorite among leftists. This argument, however, just doesn’t make sense, because race is a social construct while sex is a biological one. For decades, civil rights advocates fought against the notion that blacks and whites were genetically distinct.

Everyone’s chromosomes are literally stamped with his or her sex. Female chromosomes contain two X’s and male chromosomes contain an XY, whereas there is no biological equivalent to dictate who is black and who is white, as much of the definition is dependent upon cultural context.

Wanting to prevent grown men from using the little girls’ room doesn’t make you a bigot, and wanting to force young girls to shower in a locker room with men who pretend to be women doesn’t make you Martin Luther King, Jr.
The reason racial discrimination is wrong is not because discrimination simpliciter is wrong. It isn't, indeed, it's often necessary. Racial discrimination such as was enforced by Jim Crow laws is wrong because it sends the message that one is inferior completely on the basis of one's race alone.

This is dehumanizing, but there's nothing dehumanizing about respecting personal privacy, respecting the desire of both males and females for modesty, and protecting girls and women from the sexual perverts who would exploit the ability to use women's rest rooms for nefarious purposes. Or, do the rights to privacy and security of the overwhelming majority of people have to be sacrificed so that the less than 1% of transgenders who feel inconvenienced by having to use a sex-appropriate restroom can have their feelings accommodated?

That any of this even has to be discussed shows how far off into insanity the progressive left has taken us.