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Ever since the 1960s, the Left has had a powerful mantra used against anyone who wants to use the power of government against debauchery and libertinism, what once were known as sins: "Keep the government out of my bedroom!"
This led to striking down laws banning contraceptives, first for married couples, then for everyone, and now schools provide them to kids for free without the parents' knowledge. Then it was used to repeal laws banning adultery, fornication, and eventually homosexuality. Today it's used in an opposite sense: forcing people to accept and honor homosexual practices, even if they want nothing to do with them.
But why should Big Government be kept out of the bedroom when its remit runs everywhere else? As Reuters delicately reports in an article headlined "U.S. orders girls' locker room access for transgender Illinois student":
The U.S. government on Monday found that a Chicago suburban high school district discriminated against a transgender student and gave the school a month to provide full access to girls' locker rooms or lose federal funding.
The student, who has not been named, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought a complaint on her behalf, applauded the findings, while the school district called them "serious overreach."
Let us be more plainspoken about what is being discussed here than Reuters dared.
The high school in question has a seriously disturbed student, who when looking into his own underwear, wishes there were something there (or, more accurately, something not there) other than what, in reality, there is. This unfortunate young lad, with the full support of his parents, has elected to wear clothing and other accouterments generally associated with the gender opposite from what he, in fact, is from a biological, genetic, and scientific point of view.
Has the school district prohibited this unorthodox sartorial choice? Not at all!
Not being content with wearing girls' clothing, this justifiably anonymous youth demanded also to be allowed to behave in all other ways as a girl - specifically, in using the girls' restroom. Did the school district, perhaps, draw the line there?
No! As the article explains:
The district says transgender students may use their gender-identified locker room if they change and shower privately. The government said a separate changing place was discriminatory because it subjected the student to stigma and different treatment.
In other words, this poor deluded young person is fully accommodated in being permitted to walk through the wrong door. He can go into the girls' room. He can use the facilities there. He can hang out with the other(?) chicks therein, admiring each other's makeup in front of the mirror.
The only thing he can't do is get naked with them. There, the school district finally had enough.
He's still not required to use the men's bathroom for those purposes. He simply must avail himself of a privacy stall or private shower so as not to offend the actual girls who also want to use the locker room without being in the midst of a sausage-fest - a sensible, rational, equitable solution also endorsed by no less than Dr. Ben Carson, who as a surgeon understands physical reality somewhat better than our ruling elites.
That's not good enough for our federal Department of Education. In yet another illustration of why the Dept. of Ed must be abolished, somehow the bureaucracy there imagined that the Constitution gives them the power to demand - not request, not argue for, but demand - that the school district permit what is genetically and physically a boy in all respects to use the common gang showers with the girls.
Of course, you'd have to read between the lines of the Reuters article to figure this out. The Daily Caller was more honest with their headline: "Feds Order High School To Allow Boys Who Dress As Girls To Use Girls’ Shower, Locker Room." This is exactly what the good citizens of Houston feared when they struck down a "civil rights" ordinance that, in reality, would have forced every public place - schools, stores, restaurants, churches, the mall - to permit the same debauchery.
Even by the dishonest standards of the media, it's appalling that reporting of this is still claiming that "men in women's restrooms" is a lie when, at the exact same time, the Federal government is using the exact same principles and using its awesome power of the law and of the purse to demand exactly that! Talk about a Big Lie!
So we find ourselves in a circumstance never before encountered in human history.
There have, of course, been homosexuals just about as long as there has been sex of any sort, going back to the famous Sodomites and other biblically condemned folks.
There have also been individuals of one sex who have dressed as the other sex, most notably the ancient Roman Emperors and their families. More recently, the elites of Europe had no problem with going in drag as long as it was kept private, as is well documented:
In November 1908, [Kaiser] Wilhelm II began a vacation at an aristocrat's estate in the Black Forest. One evening after dinner, chief of the Military Secretariat Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler was performing a pas seul dressed in a woman's ballet tutu when his heart failed and he died.
This proved quite inconvenient, as the audience was in an advanced state of drunkenness and wasn't very quick-thinking. By the time they realized that the Chief of the Military Secretariat couldn't very well be presented at his own funeral dressed in a ballet costume instead of his uniform, or even delivered to the undertakers in that condition, rigor mortis had set in, making the required costume change extremely challenging.
This historical vignette underscores a most important principle: much of the time, homosexuality has been tolerated by ruling elites, as long as the peasants don't find out about it or, as Beatrice Campbell put it, "it doesn't frighten the horses." And most of the time, most of the practitioners presented themselves publicly as the men they actually are, keeping their frilly predilections to a private audience.
No doubt there has been the occasional instance of a person known to all as a man or a woman, only discovered on their death to really be the opposite. But even there, the person involved knew what they really were all along.
Only now, thanks to modern medical technology, has it become possible for the mentally troubled and confused to surgically alter themselves into a semblance of what they wish to be - famously, Bruce Jenner now sports a rather impressive rack. However, even he didn't go all the way: we are told that down below nothing has been changed, and we'll take his word for it.
So what locker room should he use? As things stand, he'd present an appealing (or appalling) show to both males and females, in different ways.
From this perspective, the school district acted with wisdom and restraint: you can dress as you please and claim to be whatever you like, the truth of your DNA notwithstanding, but when it comes down to the skinny, you do it in private where you won't offend anybody of either gender.
Yet that isn't good enough for our politically correct neofascists in government. Yes, while the Nazis did off a fair few homosexuals, there was no shortage of Nazi leaders who were just as pink themselves. But even they, for all their evil, never tried to cram homosexuality and cross-dressing down the throats of the German people. For the very first time in human history, our elites are so suffused in their own righteousness and omniscient authority that they positively revel in requiring ordinary people to bow down and all but participate in whatever reality-defying social fantasies captivate their small minds on any given day, no matter how frightened the horses, and everyone else, might find this lunacy.
Which leaves us with what ought to be fairly straightforward principles. It feels wrong to let boys say they are girls without raising an eyebrow - after all, people who claim to be Napoleon get the institutional psychological treatment they so urgently need, not a free palace and regiment to support their fantasy - but in a nation of individualism and liberty, we can accept the idea that it's none of the government's business what you wear, so long as you wear something, and even there government is having a hard time enforcing that.
Yet from earliest childhood, we all understand that what's in your shorts defines something fundamental, and separating people on this basis for certain intimate and private purposes is not bigoted discrimination but common sense.
For those who are bound and determined to be something that they're not, there are now plenty of doctors who'll use surgery to undo what God gave you. When this permanent and irreversible change has been made, it's rational to permit the individual involved full access and rights as a member of the sex that they now have the full and complete appearance of.
Otherwise, though - well, to once again quote Mike Huckabee:
Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?
If only. Here's hoping the school board honors the overwhelming demands of the parents, sticks to their publicly stated determination to fight this all the way, and finally puts this craziness in the nuthouse of political correctness where it belongs.