Ignorance turns a restroom into a political warzone
Schools across the country have fallen to political turmoil over the growing transgender protections that have been recently given to students who were not born the gender they identify as. On May 13, the Obama administration issued a decree that guides schools on how to treat students with gender identities different from that assigned at birth. The new order requires schools to allow students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that align with the students’ personal gender identity; if public schools do not comply, the federal government has threatened to pull funding. The decree is based on Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding. The Obama administration’s position is that the law covers discrimination based on gender identity as well.
Public officials have been outraged by Obama’s ignoring our blessed constitution’s supremacy clause, that rules federal over state in the political pecking order, and threaten rebellion by the use of non-compliance and paper shredders. In a professional and intellectually sound response to Obama’s order, Port Neches-Groves (Texas) Superintendent Rodney Cavness said, “He ain’t my President and he can’t tell me what to do. That letter is going straight to the paper shredder. I have five daughters myself and I have 2,500 girls in my protection. Their moms and dads expect me to protect them. And that is what I am going to do. Now I don’t want them bullied … but there are accommodations that can be made short of this. He is destroying the very fiber of this country. He is not a leader. He is a failure.”
The problems with this idiotic response are the following contradictions: One, Obama is indeed his president and having any other would take an act of secession from the United States of America; two, taking an order to the paper shredder may show defiance, but it does not make the problem go away or stop the federal government from pulling funding in Cavness’ district.
Cavness isn’t the only official who has turned their back to the federal government and the path to equality. On May 19, Oklahoma made a movement to impeach Obama over the requirements that would force them to build separate but equal restrooms for transgender students. This construction would set the state’s budget back by “1.3 billion dollars”* which will be hard to find with the state’s school budget cut due to non-compliance. There is a certain horror in the state’s “separate but equal”* and “segregated”* rhetoric which brings a painful reminder of racial segregation which has plagued the school system with Jim Crow ideology even since the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
This isn’t a problem about protecting our little girls from sexual predators anymore. It is obvious that the conservative refusal of compliance comes from backward discrimination against the LGBT and transgender community. Politicians and officials have been able to twist this protection and right for transgender students into a prohibitor for sexual predators to impurify little girls. If officials are so worried about sexual offenders, we should make laws taking away their freedoms rather than taking away the rights for students to use the facilities they feel comfortable in. Besides we don’t really have anything in place to stop male pedophiles from walking into the male restroom and doing to little boys whatever they would supposedly be doing to the girls.
The country must get over the fact that things might go against Christian ideals drafted thousands of years ago. Transgendered individuals are humans as much as anyone else, and those in power have a duty to protect those individuals rather than shun them.
The public school system is about empowering the students with knowledge, though many public officials would rather lose that ability by empower due to petty beliefs that some students do not deserve equal treatment. Many schools will lose funding because the men and women are too stubborn to allow our future to make past ideals give way to a brighter place of equality and human advancement.
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