North Carolina: Obama’s Transgender Push Creates ‘Serious Privacy and Public Safety Problems’
President Barack Obama’s transgender-boosting administration “fails to grasp the serious privacy and public safety problems” caused by its effort to prohibit single-sex bathrooms and to urge individuals to decide which of the two sexes’ private bathrooms they desire to use at any given moment, says a legal brief prepared by North Carolina.
North Carolina and its GOP governor, Pat McCrory, have filed the brief in United States District Court to answer the Obama administration’s lawsuit against the state’s privacy-protecting ‘HB2’ law, properly called the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.” The Obama administration claims the law, passed in March, violates the civil rights of gay and transgender individuals.
The State argues in its brief:
As the Act’s text and legislative history make clear, the General Assembly was focused – not on disparaging transgender individuals – but rather on a commonsense concern for preserving everyone’s privacy and safety in intimate settings such as restrooms, changing facilities, and showers. Representative McEraft aptly captured that concern when she said: “[A]s a mother and a grandmother of a fourteen-year-old grandchild, this is about common sense. This is about protecting, not from a transgender [person]…but from a predator.”
The brief cites examples from a former FBI sex crimes expert and a metropolitan sheriff demonstrating the ease with which “male predators could easily exploit the subjective access policy favored by the United States to invade the privacy and safety of North Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens.”
McCrory signed the privacy and public safety bill into law to replace an ordinance in Charlotte that allowed any man who simply declared himself to be a woman to use women’s restrooms. The ordinance was pushed forward by registered sex offender Chad Sevearance-Turner and national gay-advocacy groups.
The state’s law stirred opposition from politically correct LGBT sympathizers who boycotted the state, including Bruce Springsteen and PayPal. Most recently, the NBAdecided to move its 2017 All-Star game from Charlotte to New Orleans based solely on HB2. The social justice warriors argue the law discriminates against transgendered individuals or anyone who states he or she is a member of the opposite sex and wishes to use the bathroom of that sex.
The lawsuit comes as McCrory faces a tough reelection race against the Democratic candidate, Attorney General Roy Cooper, who has allied himself with supporters of the transgender ideology.
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins is praising McCrory for his “political courage” and “moral clarity” in refusing to cave to pressure from the NBA, celebrities and businesses which say they’re refusing to do business in North Carolina because of the HB2 law.
“He stared down the giant of the NBA and stood strong against government discrimination of private entities and for the principles of protecting privacy and safety in government buildings,” Perkins said about McCrory.
He continued about the NBA’s recent decision:
My home state of Louisiana, like North Carolina, is one of 32 states in the U.S. that does not force private businesses to allow men in women’s showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. On the other hand, in New Orleans—the same as in Charlotte—the NBA will be free to divide the restrooms at its own event on the basis of self-professed “gender identity” instead of objective biological sex, if it wishes to do so.
Only politics—not the well-being of transgender persons or anyone else—motivated this disruptive and punitive move. The hypocrisy of the NBA over North Carolina’s HB 2 law is utterly stunning. The NBA is willing to turn a blind eye and play games in countries, like the People’s Republic of China, that regularly oppress their own citizens.
Other pro-family groups have made the point about the hypocrisy of organizations and companies – such as Apple, Intel, and Disney – which condemn states that do not cave to political pressure to make gay and transgendered individuals a protected class in the U.S., yet do business in countries that actually execute gays.
Obama is using the issue of transgendered bathrooms to promote the transgender ideology, which says government should require Americans to endorse people’s declarations about their own sex or “gender fluidity,” regardless of biology. On Friday, the president’s deputies inserted a rule into the Federal Register that prohibits all federal properties and facilities from operating single-sex bathrooms.
Similarly, in May, the Obama administration issued a directive that all public schools must allow gender-confused students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms according to their preferred “gender identity” at any given time. As is often the case with Obama’s decrees, the directive is backed by threats to cut federal funding designated for school districts that oppose the policy.
According to one study of the 2010 census, the population of transgender people amounts to one in every 2,400 Americans, or 0.03 percent of the adult population. Multiple polls show that Obama’s transgender policy is very unpopular.
