Iowa Rep. Steve King wants congressional legislators to publicly pick sides in the progressives’ fast-expanding culture war against the two sexes in America.
He’s filed a pro-privacy four-line amendment to the bill that funds Congress’ annual payroll, maintenance and operations budget. The amendment would simply bar the expenditure of public funds to change the normal single-sex bathroom policy on the Capitol grounds to a transgender-boosting, mixed-sex, anti-privacy bathroom policy.
“None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to encourage, allow, or require any individual to use any bathroom other than the bathroom of the individual’s biological sex,” reads the short amendment filed with the House Rules Committee.
That’s a direct shot at progressives, who are insisting that anyone’s personal sense of male or female “gender identity” is more important than Americans’ preference for sexual privacy in their male or female single-sex bathrooms and showers.
Since March, progressives, Democrats and President Barack Obama have loudly insisted that the nation’s single-sex male and female public bathrooms and restrooms — including those in 100,000 K-12 schools — must be opened to people of the opposite sex. Progressives argue that person’s feeling of “gender identity” decides which restroom they should use, regardless of whether or not they have used hormones and surgery to reshape their bodies.
King’s bill would force progressives in the Democratic party — including Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi — to declare prior to the 2016 election if they would live by the same mixed-sex “gender identity” bathroom policies they would impose on other Americans.
However, King’s bill may be blocked by many progressive politicians who prefer to hide their views from mainstream voters.
The Rules Committee, also known as the “Speaker’s Committee,” is used by Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R.-Wis.) to control the flow and content of legislation in the lower chamber. If the committee, led by Rep. Pete Sessions (R.-Texas), a key Ryan ally, votes to declare that an amendment in germane or appropriate, it can go to the House floor for a vote. That means Ryan has the closed-door power to decide if King’s amendment gets a floor vote.
Already, supporters of the transgender ideology are blasting King’s amendment.
“The House should reject this harmful and mean-spirited amendment,” insisted David Stacy, government affairs director for the Human Rights Campaign which is the leading advocacy group for the transgender ideology.
“He’s proposing an amendment that would tell every Members’ transgender constituents they aren’t welcome to visit the Capitol, the Library of Congress, or a House or Senate office building,” he was quoted in the Washington Blade. “Surely the House of Representatives has important work it should be getting done for the American people instead of targeting transgender Americans.”
However, King’s amendment likely would not bar Congress from designating a few bathrooms as gender neutral, for use by both sexes. Conservatives support the normal shared use of single-stall restrooms by both sexes.
A series of polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among parents and GOP voters. In North Carolina, for example, incumbent Governor Pat McCrory gained a 15-point swing in his reelection race when he supported the state’s sexual privacy law amid criticism from Obama, progressives, and Hollywood. That privacy law allows transgenders to use opposite-sex bathrooms once they have undergone medical procedures and changed their legal sex on their birth certificates.
Despite extensive media coverage, the national prevalence of sex-switching transgenders is very low. A study of the 2010 census data suggested that only 1-in-2,400 Americans have switched their name from one sex to the other.
However, the transgender ideology is backed by many well-funded gay groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign.
In general, the transgender ideology says the federal government should require every American to validate every person’s choice of created “gender identity,” even though a man who wants to be a woman is still a man by every known scientific measure of evolutionary life. As a result, an Oregon law recently allowed a jury to award $60,000 t0 a transgender teacher because other teachers declined to use the teacher’s preferred pronoun, which is “they” rather than “him” or “her.” New York City has also established similar forced-speech rules.
The ideology’s claim that the government must enforce a new right to “gender identity” also means that government must ignore and often dismantle many civic rules that evolved to help the two distinct sexes — men and boys, women and girls — meet their legally equal, but different and complementary, needs.
For example, the transgender ideological demand means that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms must opened up to people of the opposite sex, regardless of age, and without any verification of created “gender identity.” As a result, it is now an offense in Washington State to ask a man in a woman’s bathroom if he thinks he is male or female. Similarly, Obama and gay advocacy groups have slammed the popular North Carolina law, dubbed HB2, because it requires people to undergo medical procedures before they can use a bathroom reserved for the opposite sex.
The progressives’ transgender war against the sexes has additional casualties. In sports, for example, women are forced to compete against stronger and tougher men who say they’re women. Each time a man wins a women’s race, a woman loses a spot on the podium.
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