Religious Right Takes Bathroom Fight Back to Schools after Defeat at Capitol [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

After failing to pass a “bathroom bill” at the Legislature, religious-right conservatives target LGBT-inclusive policies at schools.


On Monday, Allan Parker stood outside the San Antonio Independent School District’s David G. Burnet Center and asked everyone gathered to imagine Caitlyn Jenner’s dead body.

Not that Parker wants Jenner dead or anything. But, he clarified, just think of how befuddled police would be by the discovery of her corpse. Parker, a lawyer and president of the San Antonio-based Christian legal advocacy group The Justice Foundation, mused: “Bruce Jenner, who calls himself Caitlyn Jenner, would be identified as a white male in the police report by his DNA. That’s what he is. He is not a woman. He’s a white male dressing as a woman and using a woman’s name.”

What any of that has to do with the San Antonio school district, which conducts its board meetings inside the Burnet Center, underscores the religious-right fears that animated Texas’ recent legislative season.

Lawmakers this year proposed no fewer than two dozen bills aimed at restricting the rights of LGBT Texans. In June, Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a measure that critics say allows private, religious-based adoption agencies to turn away LGBT parents. A so-called bathroom bill to police public restroom access for transgender Texans became a defining issue in the Legislature, but with overwhelming opposition from schools, police officials and big business leaders, the more moderate House refused to pass it. As House Speaker Joe Straus told the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, “I don’t want the suicide of a single Texan on my hand.”

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/legislative-defeat-conservative-groups-take-bathroom-fight-local-schools/