Lawmakers, Police Still Wayyyy Too Interested In Who's In The Restroom With Them

It seems to be coming to this these days.  

Despite howls of protests from sane people, state lawmakers and conservative activists in states like North Carolina and Alabama are much, much too interested in who's in public restrooms with them.

Don't you think that's just a little weird?

I don't know about you, but if I must visit a public restroom to powder my nose or whatever, I am sooo not interested in the other people there.

They may be perfectly nice people, but under the circumstances, I don't want to say hi, I don't want them to say hi, I want no eye contact, no words, nothing.

You do your thing and I'll do mine. And let's all make sure that we make it so we have no chance of seeing what you or I are doing.

I know the people who are much more interested than I about who's in the public restroom with them say they worry about guys dressing up as gals and then molesting the women using said public restroom.

Never mind that doesn't tend to happen, and sexual assault or molestation is already illegal in the states where lawmakers and conservatives are way too interested in who's in the rest room with them.

Fox New's Megyn Kelly, questioning North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory on that states bathroom law, stated the obvious. "Typically male molesters are heterosexual, and if they want to sneak into a bathroom, they'll do it. but 90 percent of the cases, molestation happens with someone you know. So what is the fear with the transgender situation in the bathrooms?"

The answer that McCrory gave wasn't this, but I bet he was thinking he doesn't like transgendered people in restrooms because such people to his mind are icky or something.

Isn't it ickier, though, to have a guy with a beard, who was born a woman but now very much a man, to be forced to go into the womens room?

Or somebody like Caitlyn Jenner, who used to be a guy and is now very much a woman, be forced to hang out with the guys at the urinal?

Somebody's ickiness meter is broken, I think.

Some "conservative"' politicians are oddly
obsessed with who's using which bathroom where.
I think they need a therapist.  

The odious city council in Oxford, Alabama would go so far as to arrest people who they think are the wrong gender going into the wrong public restroom.

The Oxford City Council members ought to worry much more about their spelling and grammar than who's sharing the bathroom with them.

I'll quote their new bathroom law verbatim, but add  a (sic) whenever we spot a mistake.

"....citizens have a right to quite (sic) solicitude (sic) and to be secure from embarrassment and unwanted intrusion into their privacy while utilizing multiple occupancy bathroom and changing facilities by members of the opposite biological sex."

Quite solicitude, huh?  So people go into public restrooms to emphatically express concern about someone's health and happiness, if I'm reading the definition of solicitude correctly.

I'd hate to share a restroom with any member of the Oxford Alabama City Council because I don't want anybody to enthusiastically worry about my health and happiness while I'm doing my business in a public facility.

The Oxford Alabama ordinance also mentions that "single sex public facilities are places of increased venerability (sic) and present the potential for crimes against individuals utilizing those facilities..." 

What? People are more worthy of respect due to their age, dignity and character when they go into public restrooms? Well, that's what the definition of 'venerability" is.

In any event, what seems to be going on is weird people, i.e. conservative, freaking out politicians, are trying to pass laws preventing people from anybody who is not just like them from sharing a public restroom.

Again, this obsession seems awfully unhealthy for me.

It's gotten to the point, with these odd laws, maybe, that women can't even use the womens room if they don't look sufficiently ladylike.

There's a viral video out there (see it at the bottom of the post) of a lesbian woman being kicked out of a restroom because she strikes the cops kicking her out as too masculine.

Apparently the way she was dressed and her hair style made it not readily apparent to the cops whether she was indeed a woman.

The cops here were literally the fashion police.

Makeup, lovely long hair and high heels only, ladies!  No baggy hip hop style clothing that hides your gender! No boyish hairstyles!

So now that's another thing on our plate we have to worry about.  Because of weirdo politicians' scary obsessions, it seems we need to bring our birth certificates with us to the restrooms.

All this seems like it might lead to citizen vigilantes, who, as Slate puts it, "in which empowered busybodies take it upon themselves to judge who is male or female based on appearance and alert the authorities to difference danger when it arises.

 If you don't like what people look like as compared to their birth certificates, I guess transgendered people will have to pee out in the middle of the restaurant, stadium, mall or wherever they are when they have to go.

Will the perverts obsessed by who's going to the restrooms get really turned on by that, too?

I really think the oddballs passing these laws really need some serious therapy.

North Carolina Hates Me, No, I Won't Go Back There

Because of North Carolina' lawmakers' and
governor's stupidity, this dude would legally
have to use womens bathrooms and
locker rooms. Makes sense, right?

4/5/15 UPDATE:

The Associated Press this morning is reporting that PayPal has canceled plans to build an operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina because of the state's new pro-bigotry law.

The PayPal center would have created 400 jobs in the Charlotte area.

This is the first major company to make good on its threat to bail out of North Carolina because of their anti-LGBT law, that the governor signed last month.

Meanwhile, says the AP, Braeburn Pharmaceuticals is re-evaluating an earlier decision to build a $20 million center in the state.

That project would create about 50 jobs, each with a salary of over $75,000 a  year.

Lionsgate has opted to abandon the idea of filming a pilot for a new comedy in North Carolina and will do so in Canada instead. Several companies have also pulled out of a major interior design show in North Carolina.

The anti-LGBT lawmakers in North Carolina are surely saying they're putting "morality" ahead of money, but what's the morality in harming a segment of the population, while simultaneously denying economic opportunity and jobs to both straight and gay North Carolinians?

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:

I've been to North Carolina, and it's a beautiful state. From the Atlantic shores of the Outer Banks to the Great Smokey Mountains, it has a lot to offer.

Too bad its legislature and governor are so intellectually and morally ugly.

Earlier this year, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina passed an anti-discrimination ordinance that protected gay and transgender people.

The North Carolina legislator and its odioius governor, Pat McCrory, panicked over this and called together an emergency (and expensive) special legislative session to put a stop to Charlotte, tad burn it!

Basically, the new law bars any municipality from enacting ordinances that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The legislation basically allows businesses the right to refuse to serve customers based on the owner's religious beliefs. 

As is always the case when these types of laws come up, the legislation centered on panic over bathrooms.

Charlotte's nullified ordinance, along with existing local ordinances and state laws across the nation,  allow transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

The bigots that came up with laws like North Carolina's say that would allow men to go into womens' bathrooms by pretending they are women so they could sexually assault innocent women and children.

Or something.

First of all, there are no reported instances of these transgender rights ordinances and laws encouraging sexual assaults. Furthermore, last time I checked, sexual assault is illegal everywhere, including in North Carolina.

And if some guy is intent on ignoring the law and committing a rape, do you think he would be stopped by North Carolina's stupidity?

Also, check out the photo of the dude at the top of this post. It's a photo that went viral. He's transgender, definitely a guy now. Would McCrory want this guy sharing a public bathroom with his wife? Would the idiots in the North Carolina legislature want him barging in on their daughters locker room at the gym?

Under their law, he'd have to.

The dude in question, James Sheffield, Tweeted his photo when the law was signed and it went viral. It's jokey but Sheffield isn't really laughing that hard.

"It's super funny to think about some bearded hillbilly in a stall next to the governor's wife while she clutches her pearls," he said.

However, Sheffield said this would happen:

"The more likely scenario would be that I take a road trip through North Carolina - which I do often - stop at a gas station and try use the rest room..... I can follow the law and go into the women's room in a state that's a Stand Your Ground state with a very liberal open carry law, and if I do that, are women gonna stop me and ask me if I'm trans? 

Or are they just going to shoot me because they think I really am a predator because all they see is some bearded buy walking into the women's room?"

Sheffield just nailed it. The law is all about making life dangerous, or at least more difficult for LGBT people because McCrory and the legislature just don't like dem perverts!

McCrory is trying to tell us the law is about "etiquette," that men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and women shouldn't use men's bathrooms. "All of a sudden through poltical correctness we're throwing away basic etiquette," he told NBC.

So, basic etiquette is telling men they must use the ladies room because their birth certificate says they were born female? I wonder what the Emily Post Institute has to say about that.

McCrory says the uproar over the law is the child of "left wind activists groups" who are threatening local businesses and pressuring them into saying they don't like the law. "There is politicallly correct blackmail being directed toward somw of our businessess... They are caught in a very coordinated political theater."

Oh, right. I'm sure the politically correct left wing pressured North Carolina's largest newspaper, to blast McCrory.

The Charlotte Observer pulled no punches in its editorial. It read, in part:

"It was, in the end, about a 21st century governor who joined a short, tragic list of 20th century governors. You know at least some of these names, probably: Wallace, Faubus, Barnett. They were men who fed our worst impulses, men who rallied citizens against citizens, instead o leading their states forward.

This is what Pat McCrory did Wednesday, in just 12 hours. I wasn't the stand in the schoolhosue door. It was a spring past the bathroom door and straight into the South's dark, bigoted past."

Was it the political left that prompted the conservative governors of South Dakota and more recently Georgia to veto similar legislation, despite the pressure from religious onservatives not to do so?

Republican Presidential Ted Cruz had a hissy fit over the Georgia governor's veto, which tells us what kind of awful president he would be, as if we didn't know already

And what about the North Carolina Attorney General, who's running for governor of North Carolina and wants to replace McCrory? He said today he's not going to defend the state against a lawsuit that says, most likely very accurately, that the new law in North Carolina is unconstitutional.

By the way, if you're so proud of this law, McCrory, why did you and your cronies in the legislature ram this law through with little or no advance warning, with not time for public debate, no time for the public to weigh in?

I guess you don't like democracy. Who appointed you king, anyway?

The law focuses on transgendered people more than anything else. But it's a swipe at all LGBT people.

North Carolina says "we don't want your kind here." North Carolina is apparently for straight people only.

Fine. I won't go there. And neither should anyone who opposes bigotry. Because bigots may only go to North Carolina now, Gov. McCrory has regally decided.