North Carolina's bathroom law: an exercise in hypocrisy

[niyad]

North Carolina's bathroom law: an exercise in hypocrisy


Republicans suddenly incensed by the prospect of bathroom predators are the same politicians who’ve done nothing to address an epidemic of sexual assault


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A bathroom sign welcomes both genders at a restaurant in Durham, North Carolina May 5, 2016.
‘The population who is at actual risk in public restrooms are transgender and gender nonconforming people themselves.’ Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters



There’s a pro-choice saying about the Republican party: government so small it fits in your uterus. Over the years, that aphorism could be applied to any of the small spaces the GOP has shouldered its way into: doctor’s offices, classrooms, bedrooms.

It seems appropriate, then, that the hill some Republicans want to die on resides in a toilet stall. The last gasp of their flailing culture war – HB2, North Carolina’s law banning transgender people from deciding what bathroom is most appropriate and safe to use – stinks. And the justification for the law reeks of the insincere protectionism the GOP routinely uses as an excuse to discriminate. Republicans insist that HB2 simply protects little girls from predators – just as they claim that laws limiting abortion access protect women from ourselves and our doctors, or that immigration policies protect women from “rapists”.

It’s amazing how much the GOP seems to care about women’s wellbeing! Given the extraordinary concern Republicans claim to have over sexual violence, you’d think they would be working hard to end it across the board.

Rape in the military is so prevalent – 26,000 cases in 2012 – that it caught the attention of a United Nations human rights panel. Yet the party’s presidential frontrunner believes this level of sexual assault is the predictable outcome of having women serving alongside men. One in four undergraduate women have been sexually assaulted on their college campus, but the right dismisses these statistics as overblown hysterics. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alone faces three federal investigations into alleged mishandlings of rape cases, and still Governor Pat McCrory believes his time is best spent keeping transgender people from using the bathroom.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/10/north-carolina-bathroom-law-republicans-hypocrisy