North Carolina stands its ground on bathroom bill

OPINION:

There once was a time, and not so long ago, when men and women who violated the well-understood ways that society is organized would refrain from challenging the normal behavior standards, or do as they like and be treated accordingly, as social outcasts.

No longer. The bizarre dissenters from normal on the left insist that behavior scorned and shunned for countless generations must be accepted as “the new normal.” Anyone who disagrees is “out of bounds,” intolerant and various kinds of “-phobic.” Common sense and what was regarded only yesterday as common decency have been stood upside down by the left, in thrall to the radical social agenda of the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Common sense versus radical fashion has been playing out in North Carolina over the past 10 months over a state law requiring men and women to use restrooms and public locker rooms that correspond with the sex (or “gender,” as the squeamish insist) listed on their birth certificates. The gender-confused, and those eager to adopt fashions riding every wind that blows, insist on being whatever sex (or gender) they “identify” with.

A new Democratic governor campaigned to open restrooms to a free-for-all, but on Dec. 21 the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly stood its ground, refusing in a special session to repeal the so-called “bathroom bill,” which had prompted politically correct entertainers and sports leagues to boycott the state.

The bathroom bill was adopted in March 2016 to overrule “a non-discrimination ordinance” enacted a month earlier by the Charlotte City Council that, among other things, enabled the transgendered to use the restrooms and locker rooms of their choice, based on whatever “gender identity” that sounded good at the time.

When the usual suspects on the left objected to sensibly protecting privacy and public safety, the Republicans in Raleigh felt the usual Republican tremors in the knees, and agreed to hold a special session to repeal the bathroom law, originally called H.B. 2 when it was introduced in the legislature. A deal brokered by the new governor called for Charlotte to repeal its nondiscrimination ordinance and the legislature to repeal the bathroom law.

This deal was a capitulation of the Republican majority intimidated by the minority. The deal blew up when Democrats, demanding something for nothing, objected to a six-month moratorium.

The bathroom law, more properly called the restroom law since nobody goes to a public john to take a bath, thus survives the hectoring of The New York Times, which accused North Carolina of “doubling down on bigotry,” and the lecturing of The Washington Post, which cutely lamented that the state was “flushing away a chance to do right.”

Actually, North Carolina did the right thing, recognizing that understanding the behavior of XX and XY chromosomes is settled science, the estimated 0.003 percent of the population that is gender-confused notwithstanding.

One of the first orders of business for President Trump on Jan. 20 and the days immediately afterword is to direct his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to drop the Title IX lawsuit brought by the Obama Justice Department challenging the constitutionality of the North Carolina bathroom law.

Title IX forbids sex discrimination in public accommodations, but there’s nothing in its language to suggest its authors intended it to compel the sexual integration of public restrooms and locker rooms. If anyone had suggested in 1972, when Title IX was enacted, that it would be used and abused in this fashion, it would never have become law. It would have been bad law then and it’s bad law now.