Et Tu, Maura? Attorney General pulls plug on equality, tells transgender people to hold it
By Matt McDonald | December 19, 2016, 6:43 EDT
A bathroom sign reflects changing times. (New Boston Post photo by Kara Bettis) AG to TG: Hold It.
Maura Healey has betrayed transgender people everywhere.
Oh sure, she once talked a good game. Like that time back in April when she rightly dismissed attacks on the state’s new transgender public accommodations law.
Back then, some anti-transgender “family advocates” were claiming that women were in peril. Why? They made up some story about how someone who was born as a biological “man” but later discerned an identity as a woman — or something else anyway, who has a right to say? – would go into a “women’s” bathroom in a public place. And I guess the “women” would freak out or something. Because a person they claim is a “man” was in there.
What was “he” going to do, anyway?
These people even claimed that a sex-“offender” might self-identify as a “woman” so “he” could sneak into the “ladies room” looking for “victims.” And that even young “girls” might be at risk.
Imagine that, a sex offender lying about gender identity to get access to potential victims while they’re in a supposedly vulnerable situation.
As if.
Then, the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stood tall. Then, she had a message for people who identify as women who would put their own comfort over and above the rights of people whose gender identity happens to be more, well, fluid.
“I have been particularly troubled over the last year with what we’ve seen with some of the rhetoric and people’s attempts to really distract the public by discussing this as a ‘Bathroom Bill’,” Healey said back then. “And to them, I say, if you’ve got that much of a problem, hold it.”
Exactly right, girl-friend.
Everybody has a right to hold it.
So after that the bill is approved by the state Legislature in July, and then it’s up to the Attorney General’s office to write regulations to enforce it. And naturally the AG’s office declares that it’s illegal to discriminate against TG people in public accommodations, including so-called “houses of worship.”
(I question even the meaning of that term. I mean, worshipping what? And this is something I’m supposed to care about?)
So the bigots dredge up people from four of these so-called “houses of worship” and make a federal case out of it. Literally. They file a federal lawsuit in October.
In the complaint these religious types claim that their First Amendment rights are being violated.
I am so tired of this bogus argument.
I mean, it might be the first amendment to the federal constitution, but it’s the last refuge of a scoundrel.
As any legal scholar can tell you, the freedom of “religion” clause in the First Amendment was made obsolete by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed in 1868 to protect abortions, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights.
Only these anti-LGBTQ, anti-LMNOP, anti-QRSTUV people are claiming otherwise.
Legally, they haven’t got a leg to you-know-what on.
So Healey is in the driver’s seat.
But what does she do?
She makes like a politician.
She has one of the lawyers on her staff quietly send a letter to the religious people saying some mumbo jumbo about how her own staff’s inclusion of “houses of worship” in the transgender regulations conflicts with some decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court years ago. (As if that can’t be fixed.) And then the AG’s office removes the reference to “houses of worship” from the state’s web site.
In short, she folds. She surrenders to the point where the bigots drop their lawsuit.
But here’s the most troubling part: The letter actually says the bigots are right.
“Your lawsuit caused us to focus on these issues and to make this revision to our website. Thank you for bringing the issue to our attention,” says the letter, signed by Genevieve C. Nadeau, chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Attorney General’s office.
Thank you?
The Belgians did not thank the Nazis for invading in 1939. Civil rights protesters did not thank segregationist cops for spraying them with water hoses in the 1960s. And true defenders of transgenderism do not thank bigots for challenging settled law designed to make sure that persons who identify as whatever they want can use whatever the hell bathroom they want for whatever reason they want, no matter who’s in there.
If you’re impressed by what Maura Healey said back in April in favor of the transgender bill, don’t be.
Let’s not forget that back in April even Donald Trump initially said that transgender people should be able to use whatever bathroom they want.
Donald Trump!
Then in July he flipped and came out against TG-EQLT.
Just like Maura Healey.
