How the Toilet Dispute Is Challenging US Culture

Almost one year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized gay marriage as legal across the entire country. However, those who thought that would draw a final line on the cultural war surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender topics in the U.S. will be disappointed. For a while now there has been a new front line. It runs through public toilets, changing rooms and school showers alike, through bakeries as well as church halls and flower shops.

Now, the progressive mantra goes: Those who for religious reasons don’t want anything to do with gay marriage are homophobes, and are comparable to racists. And those who don’t want to see biological men, who feel that they are women, in their daughter’s changing rooms, are engaging in sexual discrimination.

This conflict normally makes the media when conservative states strike back. For instance, Indiana tried to pass a law that would give religious people the opportunity to better defend themselves before a court on questions of religious belief. Mostly the law was about protecting individuals and businesses that didn’t want to play a role in same-sex wedding celebrations from governmental enforcement. That sparked an outcry from left-wing, liberal media and LGBT activists who castigated it as a license to discriminate.

America’s Foundations Are Shaking Because of Toilets?

Things took a similar turn in North Carolina where legislators passed a law that the gender on a person’s birth certificate would decide which public toilet or changing room a person could use. What just a few years ago was considered self-evident — namely, that X-chromosomes or Y-chromosomes and primary and secondary sexual characteristics determine gender — today sparks a wave of economic boycotts. Biology doesn’t count anymore; rather, toilets, showers and changing rooms correspond to an individual’s inclination.

Democrats are trying to portray laws such as those in Indiana or North Carolina as discriminatory efforts by some political die-hards who haven’t recognized the sign of the times. But actually it is the Obama administration that has unburied the hatchet and moved the front line. The Obama administration wants to impose its own social beliefs on America’s traditional population and in doing so, is undermining one of the foundations on which America was first built — religious freedom. You don’t need to be a conservative to consider that to be an alarming development.

For example, the Obama administration dragged a community of nuns in front of the Supreme Court because they didn’t want to issue forms for President Obama’s health care law, a law which would have allowed the nuns’ colleagues to receive free contraceptives. In Massachusetts, where gay marriage was first introduced, religious establishments are excluded from the adoption system because they don’t want to place children with same-sex couples. And at the hearing in front of the Supreme Court on the issue of gay marriage, the government would not rule out the possibility of religious schools or universities losing their preferred tax status if they continued to reject gay marriage. No wonder that many traditional religious people now see themselves as being under siege by Obama’s Democrats.

Transsexuals Have To Change Behind a Curtain

And now the government is bringing the culture war into schools, and has once again laid out a law from 1972. According to this law, discrimination exists when transsexuals are not able to use the toilet or changing room that corresponds to the gender they identify with. At the end of last year, this led to a serious conflict with a school district in Chicago. One school had not allowed a student, who felt he was a woman, to use the female changing room, and instead gave her an individual room.

After “Student A” complained about this treatment, the Obama administration threatened the withdrawal of financial assistance. That sparked an outcry among pupils and parents. “What bothers me is the fact that this student is still anatomically a male,” a 16-year-old female student told The Daily Signal. At a school event, many female students argued that “it is unfair to infringe upon the rights of others to accommodate one person.” At their age, they said they already had enough issues with changing in front of members of their own sex.

But the Obama administration was unmoved by the pupils’ shame. The administration threatened the withdrawal of financial assistance until the school district agreed that Student A could use the female changing facilities. Transsexuals should just change behind a curtain. And the others would just have to live with it if Student A came out from behind the curtain, and one or more of the other female pupils were still naked.

Now nobody will argue that life is easy for transsexuals, and different interests are colliding here. It is a symbol of the polarization of the United States that both sides are playing hardball instead of pursuing pragmatic solutions. Conservatives want to reduce people to their biological sex.

For the Government, Shame Is a Reactionary Feeling

The Obama administration, however, is acting like biology is completely irrelevant in determining a person’s gender, and as if the shame that heterosexuals feel is an insignificant, reactionary feeling. It is putting the interests of transsexuals over other interests because ultimately, the LGBT community is an important group of voters for the Democrats. And it does the left-wing soul good if conservatives can once again be made out to be rednecks.

A very well known essay on Vox, a website for left-wing millennials, strongly criticized the arrogance of their own camp recently. The essay criticized the unwavering certainty about having a monopoly on wisdom, while everyone else is just seen as provincial and stupid. The liberal, left-wing “justice milieu” is demanding — quite rightly — respect for lifestyles that deviate from the norm. But there is no respect on their part for people with traditional outlooks on life.

People with traditional values are not treated with respect, but rather they are ridiculed. This arrogance goes against the views of more and more Americans. They feel like they are being dominated and sneered at by the liberal, left-wing political elite. This has, among other things, contributed to the fact that white working class people who previously voted for the Democrats are migrating to the Republican Party. Many of them are now voting for Trump because they want to get back at the politically correct.