Sunday, May 15, 2016

Are Republicans Falling Into a Democratic Trap on Transgender Bathrooms?

Much like the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, the Christofascists are obsessed with sex and punishing anyone and everyone who fails to conform to their ignorance and mythical writing based beliefs.  No one fails to conform to these beliefs, at least from the Christoifascists are LGBT individuals and the transgendered in particular.  How else to explain the hysteria on the right over the bathroom usage of a tiny percentage of the population.  A population they know nothing about and whom most of them have likely never knowingly met.  A piece in New York Magazine conjectures that Republicans - always quick to prostitute themselves to the ugliest whims of the Christofascists - may be falling into a trap over the Obama administration's new directive to public schools on transgender bathroom use.  Here are column highlights:
I first began to suspect Democrats of throwing chum into troubled waters on transgender-bathroom labeling upon reading reports that conservatives were determined to launch a platform fight at the Republican convention to make sure "bathrooms" were an important part of the GOP agenda. Yeah, bathrooms. Ridiculous, right? Not if you are a conservative religious activist who believes LGBT rights opened the gates of hell and are ushering in the End Times. I'm sure more than a few Christian Right folk heard about criticisms of the North Carolina bathroom access law and thought:This is what we've been talking about all these years
So suddenly there's a new issue on the horizon that has not only caused some problems between the presumptive presidential nominee of the GOP and its most important constituency group, but that is distracting Republicans into a fight most of them — and certainly Donald Trump — probably don't want to participate in.  
The Washington Post's Greg Sargent takes a look today at the Obama administration's directive to schools across the country to let transgendered students decide which bathroom to use, and discussion of the issue by other liberals, and concludes that Democrats are "leaning in" on the issue.  Sure looks that way to me, too. Yes, the schools directive was bland and bureaucratic, and not really mandatory, but was nonetheless designed to set cultural conservatives off like a rocket, . . .
It's unlikely a whole lot of swing voters care that much about this issue one way or another, and those who think about it for five minutes probably figure the administration's approach was a reasonable solution to a small but unavoidable problem. But even as they (and the schools, and the country) move on, conservative activists will remain transfixed, fighting for new bathroom labeling laws in the many states they control, fighting for platform planks, fighting with Republican politicians who are embarrassed by the whole thing, and maybe even fighting with each other on how to fight this new exotic import from Sodom and Gomorrah. 
This could even become a Terri Schiavo moment, wherein many Americans discover once again that the Christian Right and the political party in its thrall just don't look at the world the way the rest of us do.
The animus that the Christofascists hold towards those who challenge their house of cards belief system and fantasy world cannot be underestimated.  One can only hope that their current hysteria over the transgender will only convince more Americans to shun the Christofascists as deranged extremist who ought to be barred from the public square and polite society.  Now, if only the media would stop giving them undeserved deference and letting them bloviate without challenge. 

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