While Globe reporter Andrew Ryan was in church on Sunday, someone left this leaflet opposing the transgender public accommodations bill that is pending in the state Legislature on his car.
Leaflet left on my car outside church in Southie to "stop the bathroom bill" pic.twitter.com/joTcWTJMyY
— Andrew Ryan (@GlobeAndrewRyan) April 10, 2016
Authorship of the leaflet was claimed by a group called “Renew MA Coalition.” You can learn more about the coalition on its Facebook page, which features a photograph of Presidential candidate Ted Cruz and conservative State Rep. Jim Lyons flanking Chanel Prunier, the former Republican national committeewoman from Massachusetts. Prunier was turned out of office last week in a very close election by Gov. Baker’s choice, State Rep. Keiko Orrall. Orrall’s victory capped the Governor’s largely successful effort to replace socially conservative members of the state Republican committee with moderates more in line with Baker’s views. Those views include support for gay marriage, but so far at least, do not include support for the transgender public accommodations bill.
As the Governor continues to face considerable pressure to endorse the bill (his failure to do so caused the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce to uninvite him to an event later this month at which he was originally to be honored), the conservative wing of his party continues to hold firm to its abiding opposition to rights for transgender persons.
Indeed, the home of the Renew MA Coalition (100 Trade Center, Suite 625, Woburn) is the same address from which anti-transgender campaign literature has been coming for years. Here’s a flyer produced by one sister organization, the Coalition for Marriage and Family, that was used in the successful effort to defeat then-Representative Kevin Aguiar of Fall River in a primary election in 2012. The Woburn address is shared with other advocacy groups that are opposed to abortion rights, gay rights and transgender rights and that are affiliated with the Catholic Church, the Republican Party or both: Catholic Citizenship and the Massachusetts Family Institute also make their homes there. And the same people appear — or once did — on the staff lists of both religious and political groups: Chanel Prunier, for example, the former Republican national committeewoman, is also the former President of Catholic Citizenship. (More about these interlocking directorates here.)
If the bill reaches Governor Baker, his efforts to remake the state Republican party suggest that he’s more likely to sign it than to veto it. But the importance of this issue to socially conservative Republicans, who have lost the gay marriage fight and the fight to exclude transgender people from the state’s anti-discrimination laws in the past decade, helps to explain why it’s likely to be a headache for him either way.
From Rep. Colleen Garry filing a bill denying gender identity to State Senator elect Joe Boncore and Dan Rizzo passing transphobic lit to discredit Jay Livingstone. Not to mention our old pals Jim Miceli and John Rogers.
I give Richard Ross credit for coming out ahead of the Governor on this issue and my party will be working to encourage our members to call their legislators to vote for this legislation. It’s a matter of equality and decency, not partisan politics.
Okay. I’m going to do my best to set aside how insanely offensive that is and just stick to this: what test is there now? Has anybody here had to pass a test, of any sort, to use any restroom, ever? So what bloody hell test are they talking about?
It’s not based on any reason, simply prejudice that presumes the vast majority of the “other” are a threat to society. It’s also a way to mask shaming and bullying ones neighbor behind a thin veil of civic responsibility. Please think of the children.
Well when I was about 10 or so and a person dressed in women’s clothes used the men’s room at the Bay Side expo my dad told me it was a free country and that I was in the wrong for staring. That is how responsible people living in a civil society react to change.
There’s some nuance to Trump’s position about this and it’s useful maybe not to caricature it.
Turning the calendar back to December, Trump asserts that there are a lot of Muslims who “hate us” and that we have no way of discerning the difference between those who hate us and those, who like Trump’s Muslim friends (“they’re wonderful people”) would be just fine in this country. Therefore we should prevent Muslims from entering until we can tell what’s going on, until we prevent bad people from entering and murdering Americans.
There are two things to notice about this view. First off, it aims to be “reasonable” in the fashion in which, say, Rush Limbaugh strives to be reasonable. There’s a weighing of risks; there’s a temporary nature to the ban. I guess the idea is that we’ll only stop playing to the American ideal temporarily. We’ll get it figured out. Then everything will be fine. In other words, heard in a certain special way you can imagine it not being bigoted or xenophobic at all. It’s just a certain species of caution.
Second, though, the reasonableness, in the marketing campaign that constitutes the Trump run for president, acts as little more than a justification for channeling the anti-Muslim animus of Trump voters. It acts as a fig leaf and the “temporary ban” never gets discussed as such.
Are you actually confused? Or just snarking?
In most places, we have a test now telling us who gets to take their clothes off in a women’s locker room. It’s called a penis. A pretty easy test to implement. Anybody can run it. It’s objective.
Under public accommodations laws, this test goes away. What the flyer is saying, now the test will be purely subjective. Nobody else can second-guess intent.
As it turns out, this claim isn’t actually true. The bill, like other bills, doesn’t allow people to fake their gender identity, or to stalk, or to do lots of other bad things.
But nobody ever seems to want to explain this, and I find that curious. The website has a nice little myth busting section, but I never hear any of these defenses out of the mouths of spokespeople in the press or even online.
Mostly what I hear is a complete dismissal of the suggestion that anyone else has any legitimate interest in the issue whatsoever. This kind of dismissal is not something Dale Carnegie would recommend. It’s already cost LGBT individuals a lot of rights, and will probably cost them a lot more.
One is that creeps (males not transgender) will utilize the provisions of this bill in order to do creepy things. I guess I worry about that a bit because some of these people go to great lengths currently (hiding out, hidden cameras, etc) and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them dressed up and started using women’s bathrooms. As many people might be worried about this also, it’s not a bad line of political attack.
However, I don’t believe that’s ultimately what’s motivating the anti- forces. They think being trans is wrong. As they haven’t bought into the fact (I think it’s a fact) that there are biological roots to this, they think it’s deviant behavior that should be discouraged.
I actually know most of the people mentioned here and in the links. They’re not going to say this in most crowds, but I know they think it about the whole LGBT community (and that abortion is killing). The fact that they can’t move on is why Baker needed to get at least some of them off the RSC. You can believe whatever you want, but the imposition of these views onto the party (which then of course labels the candidates) does not lead to electoral success.
As evidenced on the national front all of these issues are coming to a head. Reagan could say all sorts of things and be supported by the religious right, but nothing (excepting the appointment of conservative judges) changed much during his time. Now it’s all about trying to advance the social agenda constantly, and on every possible front.
Fear of non-transgender predators misusing a public accommodations law is not completely ridiculous. It’s already happened. There aren’t thousands of incidents, but there appear to be a few scattered attempts.
But the people who are laying down actual cash and muscle to oppose these bills aren’t really motivated by that fear. They’re just using it a marketing gimmick.
It would help if proponents of these bills would instead acknowledge these fears but show how they’re based on misperceptions. Instead I mostly hear dismissal.
I would really like to know how these people plan to check the genitals of everyone before they enter a restroom to make sure everyone goes in the one required by law. Their motto seems to be “Keep your Hands off My Guns But the Government needs to have their Hands on your Vagina and Uterus for the sake of the little children.”
Women’s Restrooms are full of lockable toilet cubicles, there are no door-less stalls. It really doesn’t matter who goes in there, women aren’t roaming around in there exposing themselves as men do at urinals in Men’s Rooms. Its already against the law for someone to rape and molest people. This law does not make it legal for people to do that.
Its hard to blame the Governor for this bill not being passed when the House doesn’t seem to have enough votes to pass it. Who knows what the Governor will do, but it really shouldn’t matter. The House should not only have the votes to pass it, they should have enough votes to override a governor’s veto. Is this Massachusetts or Mississippi? Why do we keep electing cowardly conservative Democrats to the State House. (Not my delegation….I’m from Somerville.)