Friday, May 13, 2016

The Insanity Continues

Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt sums up pretty well one reason why there's contempt for liberal progressivism in general and the Obama administration in particular in many quarters of American society:
Your wages may not be up. Your 401(k) may be sputtering along. The murder rate in the country’s largest cities jumped 13 percent in the past year. A Federal Reserve Board survey finds 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage, and 47 percent say they couldn’t cover an unexpected $400 expense.

Children are starting to come across our southern border in greater numbers again, with fears of another surge coming this summer. Our immigration enforcement remains inexplicably lax; “In 2015, [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] freed 19,723 criminal aliens, who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them. These included 8,234 violent convictions and 208 homicide convictions; 124 criminal aliens released by ICE have subsequently been charged with homicide.”

But by golly, the Obama administration is not just sitting there!
What have they been doing, you ask? Why, just last night the Obama administration issued a directive to every public school in the nation "urging" them to make sure students are free to use whatever bathrooms match their gender identity or face punishment. Schools don't have to just provide facilities for transgendered students, mind you, they have to allow transgenders to use whatever facilities exist for students of the gender with which the transgendered student identifies.

As if public school employees didn't have enough problems, now they have to interrogate every male entering a girls' restroom (and vice-versa) to see if the students feel in their hearts that they're really a female (or male).

Here are some questions for the Solomonic bureaucrats in the Department of Education who have nothing better to do than to stick their meddlesome fingers into every local pie within their considerable reach: What criteria are school officials supposed to use to tell whether a student is telling the truth about their gender "identity"? How fluid is this identity? Can one feel he's a man today but identify as a woman tomorrow? Or an hour from now? How can anyone presume to tell the individual that he can't? Do we want to burden our already overburdened school officials with trying to sort through all this? Shouldn't applicants be required to pass an IQ test to get hired in the Department of Education?

Anyway, I can't think of a better way to guarantee that more parents will be opting out of the public school system in favor of private or home schooling than to tell them that their public school children will be sharing restrooms with students of the opposite sex. It'll also be interesting to see how many states will join Texas in suing the administration over this directive. I wonder, too, whether people will soon have had enough of Mr. Obama and his misbegotten efforts to fundamentally transform America.

Finally, I don't expect him to take advantage of it, but Mr. Trump has a golden opportunity here to force Hillary to either support this ghastly obtrusion of government power or to renounce it. Either way, he'd put her in a difficult spot, but Mr. Trump has himself forfeited the issue by having already expressed his own personal indifference to it. Too bad.