After spending months, even years, dancing around the topic, Massachusetts’ liberal Republican Governor Charlie Baker is now supporting a new pro-transgender law that would force women to share their public restrooms, locker rooms and changing areas with men who insist they’re women.
This week Baker affirmed he would sign a transgender-boosting bathroom bill that is likely to be passed by the state legislature.
“We’ve certainly listened to a variety of points of view from many sides and have said, from the beginning, that we don’t want people to be discriminated against,” Baker told The Boston Globe on Tuesday. “If the House bill were to pass in its current form, yeah, I would sign it.”
But the Republican lined up against the transgender bathroom bill when he was running for office in 2014. Even as early as 2010, Baker was campaigning heavily against transgender claims, and dismissing such laws as merely a “bathroom bill.”
It now appears Baker is 100 percent in favor of aggressive legal claims for people who wish to live as members of the opposite sex, and is willing to declare privacy-protecting single-sex bathrooms and single-sex locker rooms to be “discrimination” by the public against the less-than-1-percent of Americans who say they have a “gender identity” of the opposite sex. Baker even celebrated President Barack Obama’s new May proclamation demanding that all K-12 schools in the country open all bathrooms and locker rooms to even young and teenage students who insist they’re transgender.
“Governor Baker is pleased Massachusetts public schools adhere to policies that accommodate transgender students’ needs and believes employers should also accommodate transgender individuals’ needs,” a statement from Baker’s office said in April. “The governor supports 2011 transgender protections and believes no one should be discriminated against based on their gender identity, and looks forward to reviewing a bill should the legislature act. Lastly, Governor Baker believes people should use the restroom facility they feel comfortable using.”
Baker says he favors the likely House pro-transgender bill over the already passed Senate bill. That House bill would also allow the progressive-dominated Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to write rules and regulations to enforce the far-left’s ideological “gender identity” agenda.
That agenda demands that a person’s choice of gender should be supported by the state enforcement and even by individuals’ statements, regardless of the impact on society’s normal rules which have evolved to help the two sexes — girls and women, boys and men — achieve their different and complementary and legally equal needs, including privacy-protecting single-sex bathrooms.
Baker’s passive attitude is a far cry from that of Texas Lt. Governor Patrick. During the same week Baker finally flip-flopped on the transgender bathroom law in Massachusetts, Patrick urged schools in Texas to ignore Obama’s likely unconstitutional decree.
Lone Star Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed “this fight is just beginning.”
“Everyone’s equal rights are protected” under current law,” Patrick told reporters on Tuesday. He also said the issue was “going to be litigated in the courts for a long time.”
Polls show that the pro-transgender agenda can be very unpopular. In North Carolina, GOP Gov. Pat McCrory’s ratings have shot up since he began opposing the transgender activists efforts to deny sexual privacy to men and women.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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