Posted on 03/30/2016 7:01:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
Hanging on the rest room door of a Kroger grocery store in Athens, Georgia is a sign explaining why the facilities are unisex: “We have a UNISEX bathroom because sometimes gender specific toilets put others into uncomfortable situations.” The note goes on to list a few examples of such situations -- dads with small daughters, moms with young sons, and adults with aging parents who may be mentally or physically disabled. It is an example of something that in a place far, far away and at a time long, long ago, would have required no explanation. Not so in 21st Century America.
Even in my home state of Georgia, one of the politically reddest of Red States, a unisex rest room in a grocery store is seen as a line in the sand for a major political battle.
Just days ago, for example, the Georgia legislature passed a bill that, according to which side one listens, either protects the sanctity of Christianity from the forces of evil, or targets homosexual and transgender persons for legalized discrimination. Lost in the ruckus is any real sense of prioritization.
This is Georgia’s version of the recent wave of “Religious Freedom Restoration” bills passed in other states including Indiana and North Carolina. And, like those other laws, it is an almost entirely unnecessary response to rare and isolated incidents -- the proverbial solution in search of ?a problem.
Aside from the veiled discrimination the law might allow, the language used in the bill’s provisions (e.g., “sincerely held religious beliefs”) is so loose as to be akin to a neon sign: “Sue For Unconstitutional Vagueness.” If Georgia's Republican Governor Nathan Deal had failed to veto the bill (which he announced on Monday he would do), the ink would not have dried on his signature before the law would have been challenged and likely invalidated in the courts; thereby placing its proponents in a worse situation than before the political battle was joined.
Meanwhile, those on the political Left remain consumed with the symbolism of the legislation even more than its actual efficacy. The usual suspects, including Disney Corp. and Salesforce CEO and billionaire Marc Benioff, had weighed in against the legislation; threatening to divest their business interests from the Peach State should Deal have failed to veto it. Given Benioff’s previous zeal in leading the push to force Indiana to amend its religious freedom law, such threats are not to be taken lightly, even though they ultimately would have harmed the very people the threats are supposed to help -- employees and customers.
At the national political level, Donald Trump's rhetorical efforts to keep attention focused on him and the insults he regularly hurls at his opponents notwithstanding, a primary focus of this year’s election is on jobs and the economy -- stagnant wages, government over-spending and regulation, taxes, immigration, and related issues. Yet, at the state level, what voters see more often than not, are arguments and time wasted on what are in the most charitable characterization, niche problems.
Moreover, the manner in which bills such as those dealing with restoring "religious freedom" purport to address the "problem" is overshadowed by the intentionally provocative nature of the bills. And, for real people at home or who are trying to run small businesses profitably, true religious freedom is made no less safe; and the other, very real problems faced -- regulatory overreach and heavy taxation -- are no closer to being solved.
It is axiomatic that religious liberty is a fundamental principle protected by our Bill of Rights, but “Religious Freedom” bills such as the one presented to Georgia's Republican Governor, seek only to protect a very narrow sliver of those freedoms; and often in ways that do more harm than good. Conservatives should be pursuing far better ways to uphold religious liberty in America -- such as electing principled constitutionalists to office -- that are more productive and deserving of our political attentions, and which will engender far fewer adverse consequences to more important policy issues.
The ultimate goal of conservatives should be to change the hearts and minds of our opponents on religious freedom but, where necessary, to carefully target and repeal existing laws (including those enacted by Republicans) that limit individual freedom. Such a strategy is a far more likely future guarantee of securing religious liberty than any single and poorly-drafted bill that can be reversed with a subsequent vote or court decision.
Unfortunately, all we seem to be doing with symbolic legislation like that purporting to "restore" religious freedom, is further entrench each side in a highly contentious, but ultimately futile, stalemate in which the true meaning of Liberty slips further from the public consciousness; and with it, any real chance of constructively repairing the damage to individual freedom that decades of government meddling has wrought
Bob Barr is an idiot libertarian who couldn’t keep his seat in Congress or make a comeback. Enough said.
They also said that laws aimed at defending marriage at the national level since states were free to decide for themselves.
We are always just one judge away from granting a 40 year old man the constitutional right to whip it out in front of a 10 year old girl at the McDonald’s restroom. And if the parents complain, guess who is going to end up getting sued. Hint, it’s not the perv.
What a crock! I've been a Dad with small daughters. I took them into the men's room. There are stalls.
My daughter is a mom with young sons. If Dad isn't available, she takes them into the ladies room. There are stalls. When my aged mother needed to use the facilities and my wife wasn't around, I took her into the men's room. Guess what? There were also stalls then.
Nobody cares if a young girl, a young boy or an elderly parent uses the wrong loo when accompanied by a care giver of the loo matching gender. Nobody. They are concerned about being assaulted by some mentally deranged gender confused creep or a pervert posing as one exercising their newfound "rights".
The problem seems to be that the same milieu that foments the needs for such laws, also undermines the potential support for them.
I.e. the world has quit pretending that it’s Christian.
Will a figurative religious phoenix arise from the ashes? It could, in the form of a church upon which the actual power of God has dawned. God never needed to be legislated or voted into heaven’s throne, though we can vote for whom we are going to honor as our own lord.
I would posit that anything that undoes the fourth century folly of a church-state interdependence, will be a potential step towards an intensity of blessing that hasn’t been seen since New Testament times.
It isn’t just conservatives, it’s also liberals, who have gotten things into government under color of religion. We rightly decry the sanctimony when it’s liberals who do it. But we say that God is merely getting His due when it’s conservatives who do it.
Maybe His due is for the church to be the church, and the world to be the world. A world that isn’t pretending it’s Christian may be easier to save, it may or may not agree with gospel but at least it won’t claim it has gospel when it doesn’t.
We've walked down this road for all of my lifetime, which began in the 1950s. It leads nowhere. You cannot convince the left of anything, because leftist thinking is not based on logic and reason; leftists must instead be either converted (e.g., David Horowitz, Marvin Olasky) or thwarted, for they cannot abide anyone who does not toe the line as they constantly redraw it.
Left, in fact, seems to act an awful lot like religion.
And I hasten to add that any accusation that religion does not have logic or reason is an untrue one.
The problem is not some purported lack of logic or reason. The problem is its premises, its postulates. In the case of what we know as Judeo-Christian beliefs, these are constructive postulates. In the case of socialism, these are destructive postulates. Both systems logically pursue what follows from the postulates. When we say that socialism has no logic or reason, strictly speaking we are incorrect. We can only truly say that we cannot arrive at its conclusions by logic or reason that begins with Judeo-Christian postulates.
Nobody ever was able to prove or disprove “thou shalt [not] destroy thyself” because that is a postulate. We have a raw power struggle: Satan vs. God.
The homosexual wave will continue to push. They will not stop.
Could someone please explain to me what on earth public restrooms have to do with the proposed legislation that the GA governor vetoed? Where is the discrimination if there are separate public restrooms? Who is being discriminated against?
That should solve the problem. Think about it.
That would solve the problem, but who is going to pay for all the building remodels to change public bathrooms?
Or when you had to get the key from the attendant to use the restroom at the gas station.
exactly
“”why don’t they have bathrooms like they have in a doctor’s office where only one person at a time goes in and the next person waits until the person that occupies the bathroom gets out.””
That’s what I would picture but must be some see it differently. My library has two restrooms and you just lock the entrance door when you go in. I do believe there are two at the Kroger I go to - one opposite the other and the same thing; go in, lock the door... Anyone else wants in, they just wait. No different on an airplane. Why on earth do these idiots have to make everything so difficult? Do they not have IMPORTANT things to occupy their minds? Or do they not have minds? Boggles mine!
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