Courageous States and a Cowardly Congress

By: American Decency Staff

Don’t mess with Texas. 

Or Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, and Maine.  These eleven states are filing a multi-state lawsuit against the Obama administration for their attempt to order all public schools in the nation to implement their radical transgender agenda.

Weeks after President Obama's order mandating that all public schools open their bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers to students of both sexes, lawmakers are fighting back against this massive overreach.

The complaint said the Obama administration:  “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.  …

If anyone doubts that the privacy rights of children will be jeopardized under Obama’s transgender decree, just look at this article from the Detroit Free Press where school officials in Howell, Michigan are allowing a nine-year-old girl to use the boys’ bathroom!  We often think of girls having their privacy and safety invaded, but it’s an issue for boys as well. 

As the article states:  Matt Stewart said his 9-year-old son informed him Friday that “there was a girl in the bathroom” and the girl was told “to look at the wall” while boys were told to stand closer to the urinals. He said his son indicated the information came from a school staff member.

“I have three children in Southwest Elementary School and they are being humiliated and intimidated,” Stewart said Wednesday. “Our kids are absent from school until there’s a policy in place that keeps them from being humiliated or intimidated. …

“The bottom line: A 9-year-old girl is in the boys' bathroom with my son,” the father said, adding there is no precaution to keep the girl from walking out of a stall and seeing a male classmate urinating. …

So nine-year-old boys are told to “stand closer to the urinals” while girls are told to “look at the wall.”  This is lunacy!  However, this demand denies the false reality that they’re trying to embrace. If asking a “transgender” to use a unisex restroom is offensive, then how is asking them to look at the wall any less offensive.

When going against Biblical values, one must throw common sense out the window; but, when trying to promote two worldviews which clash with each other, foolishness echoes off these bathroom walls.

As this parent states – it’s a policy that brings humiliation and intimidation.  While President Obama claims his goal is to protect the dignity of students who identify as transgender, what about the dignity, privacy, and safety of millions of students such as this nine-year-old boy?

As a former public school teacher, I remember the days when I would accompany my class to the high school pool for swimming lessons.  Of course then the girls went into the girls’ locker room and the boys into the boys’ locker room.  How embarrassed the girls would get about having to change in front of their female classmates!  I imagine it was the same for the boys.  Whether young or old, we all have an aversion to undressing even in front of members of the same sex.  Yet now we’re supposed to tell children to ‘just get over it’- ignore the sense of modesty God created in us – and instead “look at the wall” or “stand closer to the urinal” if you’re uncomfortable with a member of the opposite sex in public restrooms or locker rooms.

And that is exactly what the editorial board for the North Carolina Charlotte Observer wrote in their newspaper:  “Yes, the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms – and vice versa – might be distressing to some.  But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort – with blacks sharing facilities, with gays sharing marriage – then realizing that it was not nearly so awful as some people imagined.”

In other words, children (and adults) who do not want to be forced to share locker rooms and bathrooms of the opposite sex are the equivalent of racists!

Trying to equate the transgender bathroom concern to Jim Crow Laws is an affront to the very real discrimination Black Americans faced in our nation’s history.  As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the charge in the 11-state lawsuit, stated:  "It's about parents who are upset, grandparents who are upset. They want to see that the safety of their children is taken care of."

Speaking of civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a dream of acceptance. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” What kind of character are we promoting within our society and in our children when we train them to disbelieve the most basic concept of who they were created to be.

If character is not to be measured by absolute truths, what is the standard of character?  We thank God that there are eleven states who will stand against such lawless federal overreach; we pray that there will be many more who will come to their senses.

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