Posted on 04/24/2016 5:28:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Advocates of traditional family values are calling for a boycott of Target in response to the retail giant's announcement that they allow transgender people to use the restroom and dressing room that aligns with their preferred gender identity. The other way of saying this is that grown men have unrestricted and no-questions-asked access to bathrooms designated for women and girls.
Via their website, Target announced, "[W]e welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity. Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."
Critics allege that this move is less common sense than nonsense by putting women and girls at risk of increased predation because sexually predatory men will use Target's policy to gain access to female victims. These are very serious concerns, and should not be minimized.
So how can we act to protect the most vulnerable in our society and actually effect change?
Three considerations to tamp down the hair-on-fire call to boycott Target:
1. While it is true that sexual predators exploit the freedom and trust in our society, predatory behavior remains illegal at all times in all places. Target is on notice that there is concern and fear that their policy invites predation. They should be given the opportunity to prove to be a good corporate citizen by announcing specific plans to insure the safety of all people while in their stores.
2. We need to step back and acknowledge what's actually happening on a larger scale and deeper level. The culture has shifted and nonsense has replaced common sense in many sectors. What was once considered absurd now demands not only accommodation but cultural adulation. That brings to the reality that transgender people feel as uncomfortable in a restroom that does not align with their gender identity as you feel with the idea of sharing a restroom with a person whose anatomy does not align with the sign on the door.
This is complicated and culturally contentious but raising the alert level to full-scale-screaming does not help. There is a clear contest underway in our culture: is gender a God-designed binary reality or is it a mutable fluid of the individual?
If Christians start boycotting every corporation that operates out of progressivism's politically-correct profit-motives, our choices are going to be very narrow, our voice further sidelined and our influence further diminished.
3. The boycott war is neither persuasive nor effective. States, colleges, professional sports associations, global corporations and performers have all joined the boycott of states whose laws require that in public environments, people use the restroom that corresponds with their birth certificate. So maybe boycotting Target is tit-for-tat turn-around-is-fair-play. But what does that accomplish?
Maybe a corporate engagement strategy through Target stock shareholders or a proactive campaign that seeks to fight predation of women and girls and addresses the dehumanizing abusive bullying of transgender people would yield superior results. The current boycott war is only driving us further apart from those with whom we disagree and those whose challenges we don't understand. (And yes, I'll be escorting my minor children to the bathroom while simultaneously exercising my second amendment right.)
Alternatives to a boycott:
How might we influence the conversation without threatening withdrawal and boycott? Is being further sidelined and isolated really the most effective approach for Christians who hope to positively influence the culture? How can we help insure every person's privacy and protection, including women, girls and transgender people? Is there a simple and reasonable accommodation that satisfies all concerned? What about the addition of single access, single occupancy restrooms or changing rooms?
Suggesting that boycotting Target misses the target is not to say that as consumers and citizens we should be silent or passive.
Each of us and all of us need to be proactive about our own protection: if you are a woman and you are by yourself and need to use the restroom or changing room, ask a female associate to monitor the facility. If a person who presents as male seeks entry, the Target employee should inform that customer that the facility is occupied and currently unavailable. If they can't wait, they could be directed to the single occupancy facility. If they protest, they should be informed that although their right to use the restroom or changing room of their choice is Target's policy, that policy holds for every guest and team member. And the guest or team member currently using the facility has asked for a reasonable accommodation of their safety. And if we're talking about your child, you should be in the facility with them at all times.
Instead of boycotting, why not call on Target to insure the safety of women and girls while they are also providing reasonable accommodation to transgender individuals? Instead of widening the chasm why not find the common concern of privacy and safety which stands at the center of concern for both groups?
If you'd like to weigh in personally, call Target Guest Relations at 1-800-440-0680. Share your concerns on their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/target.
That’s a good point. Just like the ‘gay marriage’ thing. When you are at the point of having to vote on marriage it’s probably long gone round the bend anyhow.
Freegards
“Why not call on Target to insure the safety of women and girls...”
...and boys. Boys are “target”ed too. Let’s not forget that the LGBT crowd in general regard public restrooms as their meetup locations to have sex, not just to relieve themselves.
Right now they’re dialing down their sexual activity in public restrooms, as part of the political strategy, just like they sanitized gay “marriage” to make it look all nicey-nice and family-fied, while insisting it wouldn’t affect anyone else, or go any further.
Look where it’s gone already, and they’ve only just started. Look at the US military.
Soon they’ll be exercising their “right” to have glory holes in the stalls and butt sex at the urinals, a la Folsom Street Fair.
The trannies who still have their penii but “feel” like women will want to have their butt sex in the ladies’ room.
And if you don’t want your little boys and girls subjected to this, YOU will be in violation of “the law.”
This article is BS. I’m boycotting every one of these companies and will tell them why. It’s not hard—just buy everything second-hand.
Target, and other stores, are headed towards having to employ “attendants” for each of their bathrooms. Better restaurants in Europe often have attendants in their bathrooms. Maybe that’s a good thing for the sake of cleanliness (other than just the safety issues). I live in California and in recent years I have been really annoyed at the filthy conditions of the formerly clean Ladies Room in many stores.
See my post # 122.
Suck it Target !
Beam me up Mr. Speaker. There is no longer intelligent life here on earth.
“I would even go to the point of getting a license to carry a concealed weapon if the state I lived in allows that.”
What are you waiting for?
Get your CC, weapon and carry paraphernalia now while you can, then carry every day.
This is not an issue of logistics but one of principles.
Your idea not a solution it is avoidance and tantamount to appeasement. It does not solve the problem but instead skirts it so that it must be confronted later in a much larger higher stakes fashion.
These psychos will eventually demand and require that you use the restroom with them. Just as NAMBLA wishes to lower the age of consent so as to have a larger and cleaner supply.
Nope. Not giving up urinals. Deal with it.
These psychos will eventually demand and require that you use the restroom with them.”.... I laughed out loud, then realized it COULD happen!
And hang your own sign on the door when using it.
Make Target or any other business with public bathrooms build a separate, one stall, transgender bathroom. Problem fixed.
At the very least, everyone who is just taken aback and revolted by Target’s policy should call their Target Guest Relations at 1-800-440-0680 and tell them that this substantially changes their willingness to shop there.
But know that the only thing that matters to these people is the top and bottom line. This is their “morality”.
I am a fan of “whatever happens to a vulnerable customer happens to their CEO too”.
They are a corporation the in order to survive HAS to have increased sales. They will not survive with even consistent sales, their stock will tank.
A boycott is very effective if properly and maintained. Even a 20% reduction is sales will kill them and a higher percentage will send a message in capital letters to the rest of industry thinking about this stupid policy.
The problem is, Americans do not have the will to maintain a boycott until the corporations concede. Americans think they cannot survive without their new “stuff”.
That would never be good enough. The ones who claim they are what they aren’t would never use them. They don’t think they should have to. At most some type of ‘third way’ bathroom would just catch overflow from lines in the two regular bathrooms.
Freegards
Irrelevant. The issue is the danger this creates for children and women. If you have to GO, you have to GO.
Perhaps the opposite to a boycott would work better. If normal men, in large numbers, just started wandering into the women’s restroom, just to look around, wash hands, take a dump, whatever, I think Target would change its mind.
Boycott Target and several more. Businesses should have had the good sense to never begin reacting to threats from narrow special interest groups. But they lacked that good sense and now I think the only way conservatives can stop businesses from caving to leftists is to start even bigger boycotts in response.
If business learns that no matter what stance they take on social issues, they lose, then maybe they’ll start ignoring pressure from interest groups and let those issues be decided elsewhere, in the arena of public opinion and the political process.
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