Far-left gay activists have launched a sneak ambush in North Carolina to help win a national culture war over sex, transgender and “gender identity,” even before surprised voters realize what is happening, according to the state’s governor, Pat McCrory.
“Right now this debate’s about gender identity and I’d say probably 90 percent of the nation has no idea what we’re talking about,” he told a reporter from Mountain Express.
The liberal reporter had tried to tell the governor that “North Carolina has kind of brought this [gender] conversation to the nation,” but McCrory corrected him.
It was brought up by more of a national group bringing this to North Carolina than North Carolina bringing this to the nation … In fact, the [D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign] told me they were going to make North Carolina the epicenter of the transgender movement for the United States of America, so it was strategically brought to North Carolina by a very powerful, national organization, which they’ve got the best political machine I’ve ever seen, and [the best] media machine I’ve ever seen … it’s extremely quick how this came up through the coordinated campaign.
McCrory’s focus on the HRC gay group was backed up even The New York Times, which reported in a May 21 article, that the group quietly began the fight by helping to elect three far-left supporters to the city council in Charlotte in 2015.
The new council then voted to open the city’s single-sex bathrooms to people of the opposite sex who merely claimed to be transgender. The city did not set any test for verifying the claims, ensuring that anyone was free to use either sex’s bathrooms as they wish, thus junking the ability of the local community to preserve their privacy in public single-sex bathrooms.
In response, the North Carolina legislature quickly passed a new law, numbered HB2, which affirms the sexual privacy of men and women by preserving single-sex bathrooms. The March law says people are restricted to using the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificate — but it also allows people to change their birth certificate after they undergo surgery. That process means the law’s compromise supports the practical needs of a few post-surgery transgenders and also the public’s much demonstrated preference for privacy in single-sex bathrooms.
The law was furiously protested by a coalition of sexual minorities led by the HRC, whose symbol is two yellow lines on a blue field.
The NY Times admitted that gay groups were the driving force in Charlotte.
In Charlotte, an anti-discrimination ordinance failed in February 2015; after that, the Human Rights Campaign and other gay rights leaders poured money into a new organization — Turnout Charlotte. The goal was “to identify and support and ask candidates, ‘Where are you on this issue?’ ’’ said LaWana Mayfield, an openly gay City Council member.
With heavy backing from the activists, three new council members were elected last fall, tilting the balance on the council, which passed the anti-discrimination ordinance in February.
The gay groups also get much credit from the New York Times for President Barack Obama’s startling May 9 escalation, when he declared that all 55 million K-12 students in 100,000 schools must lose their their single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms to help raise the status of a few transgender students. The transgender population is so vanishingly small, for example, that a study of the 2010 census showed that only one in 2,400 adult Americans have changed their name from one sex to the other.
Obama’s national K-12 bathroom decision, according to the NY Times, “was the product of years of study inside the government and a highly orchestrated campaign by advocates for gay and transgender people.”
Yet the newspaper also inaccurately portrays the ideological fight as merely a noble crusade to protect vulnerable bathroom-using transgender teens from racist-like hatred.
Mindful of the role “Whites Only’’ bathrooms played in the civil rights battles of more than half a century ago, they have been maneuvering behind the scenes to press federal agencies, and ultimately Mr. Obama, to address a question that has roiled many school districts: Should those with differing anatomies share the same bathrooms?”
This heartwarming teenage-victim portrayal hides the outspoken agenda of the gay advocacy groups and their progressive allies. As they repeatedly say, they’re trying to impose in law and in culture the far-reaching claim that people’s self-created feelings about their sexuality are more important than their actual evolved biological sex.
“Transgender men are men — they live, work and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work and study as women,” said Vanita Gupta, the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in a May 9 press conference backing Obama’s national K-12 bathroom policy. Attorney General Lynch made similar creationist gender-before-sex claims at the press conference.
Roughly speaking, the transgender ideology claims people’s feelings about their maleness or femaleness, also known as gender or “gender expression” or “gender identity” must be endorsed by the state and must be validated by their fellow citizens, no matter how unwilling they are. For example, if a man or boy says he feels like a woman, he should be treated as a female by the law and by society and by other individuals — regardless of science or religion or civc rules or worries about sexual assault or his obvious inability to grow a new human inside a womb — according to this gender-before-sex ideology.
These intrusive political goals are now being fully imposed on K-12 students by Obama’s national K-12 bathroom directive, which has prompted a lawsuit from at least 11 states.
This idea of fluid gender is completely different from the science-backed, commonsense, worldwide view that men and women are born into unchangeably male or female bodies, and that society should help boys and girls, men and women, get the best from their always flawed male or female bodies. Societies help people get the most from their male and female bodies by allowing them sexual privacy and sex-specific facilities and sport leagues, and by backing customs and laws that support marriage and childrearing.
But pro-transgender activists oppose laws and civic culture that recognize the existence of the two distinct and complementary sexes, which they criticize as “the gender binary.” So they logically oppose North Carolina’s bathroom privacy law because it weakens the claim that anatomical sex is less important than chosen fluid gender.
This opposition to any test or distinction between the two sexes is backed by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which supported Charlotte’s no-verification process and opposes the HB2 verification process, according to Aaron Sarver, the group’s communications director.
This gender-before-sex view is also illustrated by some of the readers’ comments in the May 21 New York Times article. According to ‘ultimateliberal,’
We seem to be oblivious and ignorant of the pains transgender people suffered during their decision-making and their lengthy transitional periods. It’s time we acknowledge their courage and respect them for the authentic persons they are, finally. Must the ordeal of gender change plague these brave people all their lives? They are who they are, today, not who they were last year or so.
‘CCZ’ from Trenton N.J., laid out the argument for the two different sexes;
[The dispute] is NOT just about bathrooms. It is ANY and ALL female space, regardless of the state of dress or undress, locker rooms, shower rooms, changing rooms (and all female sex separated activities, sports included). Do thoughtful people really want a male merely “identifying” as or “feeling” like a woman / female to be given unrestricted access to the most personal space offered to biological females?? Biology is real and a scientific fact. Biology (female / male) is enshrined in law and socially accepted as a means for acknowledging that males and females are physically (not intellectually) different. How many males (regardless of their gender identity) have ever menstruated, become pregnant, given birth, or needed an abortion? NONE!! Women are legally entitled to and deserve female protected space, especially when males with male genitalia intact assert that they are “women” (which biologically they can never be) and want access to female spaces. Transgender persons deserve 100% legal protection from economic and employment discrimination and freedom from harassment, but NOT unrestricted access to the most personal space of biological women (females). And I am a “T” member of the LGBT community.
McCrory sketched out this larger gender agenda in his talk with the North Carolina journalist, who had been focused on the side-issue of bathrooms. “Right now this debate’s about gender identity and I’d say probably 90 percent of the nation has no idea what we’re talking about,” he said.
That broader view was echoed by Sarver, who told told Breitbart News that “the vast majority of people, certainly in the legal context, don’t understand distinctions between sex and gender identity or [the] non-distinctions.”
But all of the federal government — and thus the voters — need to be part of the debate in the long run, McCrory said.
Because of the quick action of the Charlotte City Council, and even the Legislature, and now the president — in the short term, sadly it’s going to probably be resolved in the courts. In the long term, I think we have to have a clear dialog and understanding of the complexities of a new issue that’s come [to the] front in literally months … my dilemma with the federal government right now is that the president’s making all the decisions and his job is not to make law, but to enforce law. And I think all three branches of government have to be a part of this discussion, not just the executive branch.
Laws about sex and gender should be made by Congress, not by cities or states or the president sitting in the White House, he said.
I think the 1964 Civil Rights bill needs to be updated and discussed to include many issues that are being addressed at the local state levels in a hodgepodge of ways. I think it’s not good for the country, for every city and every state to have different discrimination laws. It’s caused confusion, inconsistency in application, and I think that’s harmful to the nation. And my dilemma with the federal government right now is that the president’s making all the decisions and his job is not to make law, but to enforce law. And I think all three branches of government have to be a part of this discussion, not just the executive branch.
McrCrory also cited the pressure from the gay lobby and its media allies, who are quick to smear their critics as bigots, and little different from racists.
Even today, I’ve had discussions where I get continued information and education on a very complex issue — about gender identity, gender expression and other terms that, frankly, I’m not sure we’re allowed to use anymore.
McCrory pushed back agains claims by conservatives and gay activists that opposition to the gender agenda is based on worries about bathroom safety. “It’s actually more about respect for privacy. Expectation for privacy is the main issue I’m speaking of,” he said.
McCory also sketched out the media’s biased advocacy for the gender-above-sex agenda.
The media is using these terms and coming to conclusions when they have yet to define [them]. So the media hasn’t actually been responsible in this debate either. I think, frankly, the media has already come to a conclusion; but, boy, the nation hasn’t come to a conclusion because I go from one group of people to another and there’s just an extremely huge divide on this issue and I’m talking about within the towns, including even here this afternoon I’ve had people come up to me and go “Thank you, you hang in there, don’t budge,” and I’ve had other people come and go, “I’ll make sure you never get elected again.”
In his home state, for example, a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, said the bathroom privacy bill makes North Carolina the “stupid state.”
But recent polling of Americans shows that majorities are against transgender men being allowed to decide what public bathroom they feel like using or what locker rooms and changing areas they want to chose on any given day. A recent Rasmussen poll, for instance, shows that most parents oppose forcing transgender policies on schools. Another poll found that the majority of North Carolinians support the HB2 law. So far, students at two schools have rebelled against Obama’s bathroom directive.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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