Restroom Access

The vindictiveness of politics these days is really getting to be overwhelming. We’ve become numb to the idea that government can do anything helpful since President Reagan assured everyone that government was the problem and went about inspiring a generation of extremist politicians to prove that point. It’s come to the point that there is a significant number of people on both sides of the spectrum who think that we need to simply overthrow the current political system to either start from scratch or somehow live without any central authority to maintain the military, justice system, transportation system, public education, the social safety net, etc. But I didn’t realize quite how petty, shortsighted, and simply stupid the national discourse had become until I was struck with daily reports on bathroom bills and the ensuing controversies that have come about since their passage in states like North Carolina.

At a time when the United States has a significant debt and only barely manages to convince a majority of politicians to actually address the problems of debt ceilings, leave along deal with it responsibly; at a time when the United States is embroiled not only with an international struggle against the threats of terrorism, but the resulting refugee crises; at a time when national campaigns are inundated with countless fortunes by undisclosed special interests, and the polls are being ever more barricaded against honest citizens, some of the leaders of state governments have seen fit to enact legislation to monitor who uses a toilet. Apparently I had been blissfully unaware of the epidemic of transgendered people going to the restroom. Now maybe it’s because I have Crohn’s and so I am just keenly aware of the phenomenon, but these politicians are full of shit.

Researchers on both sides of the aisle have wracked their brains searching for any instance when a transgendered person ever used a protected status law to shield them from persecution for preying on small children, mostly because it’s virtually impossible to find an example of a real trans person abusing a child in a public restroom. What’s more the laws that have been passed are, by their own design, unenforceable because there is no fund set up to equip bathroom monitors to cover each and every lavatory door and demand birth certificates from those members of the public, who might dare to use a public restroom. These are punitive and petty measures that one might generously call a solution without a problem, but it is in fact a shell game covering up what the real problem was. The problem here was not that anyone was really disgusted when they went to a restroom to find they shared it with a transgendered person, because in my experience people tend not to make any eye contact in public restrooms, let alone take the time to scrutinize the original gender of all individuals in those restrooms. The problem was that a small subgroup of politically powerful religious activists felt that they’d been slighted by the advance of the LGBT communities and wanted to feel that they were on the right side of a battle that does not exist.

The thought seldom occurs to people these days, when it comes to politics, that it might be worthwhile to weigh what the real issues are and what responsible policies would be to solve those problems. Instead we are inundated with rhetoric that assures us that the only things worth fighting about are A) Who is to blame for any given problem and B) how can we punish them? On the Left we want to ask who is to blame for climate change, who is to blame for income inequality, and the answer is quite often a handful of moneyed conservative boogeymen like the Koch Brothers. On the Right the questions are usually more like who’s to blame for unemployment, who’s to blame for bloodshed, and the answer is quite often “foreign” groups like undocumented immigrants and Muslims. So we both design legislation that is designed not to solve the problem in either the long or short term, but to merely punish the people we blame and hope that the rest just sorts itself out. I do not pretend to be above this sort of thing, as I have most certainly found it satisfying to seek out appropriate scapegoats, but I am doing my best to stop because I see that it simply isn’t an effective problem solving strategy.

But it is also crucial that we do not let everyone off the hook by pretending that it’s a pox on both our houses and everyone bears the same amount of culpability. There clearly are people and groups of people in this country who are more responsible than others for pushing policies whose sole purpose is to hurt people and solve nothing. I am merely saying at this point it does us no good in the task of solving the real issues of our nation, and our planet for that matter, to devote all our time and energy giving into the retribution against those responsible. And these bathroom bills are the absolute bottom of the barrel, because if people were interested in solving even a small problem there is one that concerns restroom access.

It is a common occurrence to see restrooms in businesses marked with the notice “for employees only.” This makes sense, as it is private property and the proprietors want to limit the abuse of their property as much as possible. If you are the average person it can be a slight annoyance when you do have to go to find that you’ll have to keep looking for a place to go; however, there is a problem in America if you are someone who is routinely in situations where you simply cannot wait to find ever rarer public restrooms, in a country that routinely defunds anything public. I’m talking about the real Restroom Access Act or Ally’s Law. Several states from Massachusetts to Texas, but by no means a majority of states, have passed such laws that allow certain individuals with chronic bowel diseases to have access to restrooms of retail establishments when emergencies strike.

If this seems like a quite narrow issue to get hung up about, it certainly is. But when compared to the nonsense issue of these persecutory bathroom bills that do nothing to promote safety of children in practice, and serve only to further marginalize a group that is already more likely to face discrimination and violence on a daily basis, it is of monumental, real world importance. Yet this niche issue that would help real people is ignored and the disgraceful one that hurts real people is the one making constant news. And since we are going to waste days, weeks and longer on issues that do not even begin to tackle the larger problems we face as a society, it might as well be one that actually provides some relief to people.

I am perfectly willing to spend my time debating and negotiating in good faith with people who have significantly differing opinions than my own on issues of consequence, because that’s ultimately the only way we’re going to be able to come together as a society and create workable policy that most of us can at least stomach. I am not, however, willing to continually waste time on the vanity projects of those who simply want to punish people without a second’s thought on how to solve real problems. I am not, for instance, willing to debate whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution in biology class in the 21st century; nor am I willing to debate whether the US should include torture and other war crimes in our rules of engagement. I am willing to debate how we can best use public funds to provide the highest quality education to our nation’s children, and how we can best use our public funds to create a military that is strong enough to keep the nation secure and our soldiers as safe as possible.

Our nation was never perfect, our politicians were never perfect, which is incidentally why our Constitution makes it the national goal “to form a more perfect union,” among other goals. So perhaps it is just the bias of being in the moment without the possibility of rose-tinted nostalgia to soften the edges, but it just seems like politics has grown more petty and vindictive recently and I’ve grown tired of it. We need a significant change in how we approach national discourse and what laws we pass, because government isn’t always the answer, and indeed can sometimes be the problem, but can also be the answer, when the people working at it are working in good faith. Until that happens it seems that we’ll all be mired in the reality that our politics, our politicians, our political discourse are all right in the crapper.

The Eternal Sin of Poverty

For the last news cycle or so, the media has been fixated on the comments made by the Republican frontrunner concerning abortion. Apparently, the candidate, who has thus far garnered the most votes and the most delegates in the Republican contest, thinks that the only way to curtail abortions in this country is to have some form of punishment for the woman in question, though he did stop short of prescribing a punishment for the man. Setting aside the very likely case that this was an uninformed comment made off the cuff, a comment that he has already been forced to back off from, and a comment that stands in the face of positions he once held in the not too distant past, I want to talk about the reactions we’ve seen from the Right in response to it. If any reaction to this ridiculous policy position contained the words shock, surprise,” or any synonym there of, without a negating phrase before it, then that person clearly hasn’t been paying attention or is being dishonest. This comment is only notable in the same sense that the rest of Trump’s campaign positions are, because it tears down the facade of dignity that the GOP so often likes to carry around by bluntly describing what the conservative position has been for years.

With winks and nods the Republican Party has become quite adept at enacting policies that, when looked at with clear eyes, would be widely considered immoral, unproductive, and simply wrong. This is true of failed economic policy that always promises to trickle down wealth and prosperity to the masses, but only ever lines the pockets of the investors at the very top at the direct expense of the workers who find themselves with lower wages, less workplace security, fewer opportunities to move up, and little to no chance of forming a union that might fight on their behalf. This is true of failed education policies that strip funding from schools, deprive students of accurate information, require teachers to shoulder ever greater burdens for the sake of their students, and further entrench already existing lines between rich and poor/black and white. This is true of failed environmental policies that allow well endowed businesses to poison water supplies, cause earthquakes with fracking, and let loose endless carbon at levels that threaten our ability to live on this planet. This is true of failed defense policies that have us spend billions on weapons that don’t work, spend billions on wars that we can never win, spend billions on arms sales that only create new and better supplied enemies of the future, and cost this nation and her families young men and women who die nobly defending their homeland in foreign entanglements that never end. This is true of so many policies foreign and domestic that should serve only to prove that the extreme conservative policies of today’s GOP do not and cannot work; however, the continued support of conservative politicians should be some indication that the truth is not being relayed in its totality.

The Republican Party operates on one fundamental tactic; there is us and there is them, and they are the root of our problems. They can change as suits the need of the GOP in any given election year. This year they tend to be Muslims and Immigrants, particularly those who speak Spanish. This is a very effective tactic, because you don’t need to actually go into any detail about how your proposed policies would actually solve anything, it’s just common sense that if we got rid of the problem people then there wouldn’t be any more problems. Taxes got you down? Then we just need to get rid of the IRS. Economy a little sluggish? Just get rid of those lazy immigrants who’ve taken all the work. Feeling like the world isn’t very secure? Just kill all the Radical Islamic Terrorists. Think abortion is a problem? Well, let’s just find some way to punish all those involved with abortions.

These positions don’t need to be backed up with any form of reality and frankly it would be better for all involved if we were shielded from the facts that someone needs to collect and enforce tax law, net immigration with Mexico is going into Mexico, more Americans are killed by Christian terrorists than Muslim terrorists and in both cases they are rare events, and one of the most likely demographics that is likely to actually get an abortion are the groups most likely to oppose it, Evangelical Christians. But the point of these policies isn’t to solve problems it’s to condemn and punish the wicked, whoever they are, because it sure isn’t us. John Kasich may act like a Victorian dandy, fainting at the mere prospect of doing something as extreme as punishing women for abortions, yet he has already done more to punish women for abortions than Trump. As governor, Kasich has banned all abortions after 20 weeks, which is arbitrary in itself, but also has no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, in spite of his claims that those are the exceptions he makes. During his tenure as governor, the number of abortion clinics has been cut in half, meaning women have to travel ever longer distances to access a safe and may I remind you legal medical procedure. This is the moderate conservative position now? This is not punishing the woman?

Ted Cruz is, of course, no better on the subject. As solicitor general of Texas he was instrumental in defending some of the most draconian laws that above all punish the woman. And let’s be clear having an abortion does not mean that the woman in question won’t have children at some point in her life. I mentioned Evangelical Christians as a demographic that is very likely to have an abortion, but there is one that tops the list, women with children. See I find it telling that politicians like Kasich and Cruz have gone out of their way to attack Planned Parenthood, because that really is the conservative position, to attack family planning. I think it is better when adults make informed decisions about bringing children into this world, because raising children is incredibly difficult. I have all the respect in the world for my sister and brother in law, who are raising two beautiful kids, because damned if I know how they are able to do the work of parenting day in and day out. Potential parents need to know the realities of raising kids, the financial realities, the medical realities, and everything else. It’s not fair to the parents and it’s not fair to the kids to force anyone to make life changing decisions. Yet the repeated calls from conservatives have been heard and instead of trying to help families plan for their futures, so many state governments choose instead to punish the woman.

Every trans-vaginal ultrasound, every incarceration of a woman who simply had a miscarriage, every unnecessary requirement on clinics that forces women to travel hundreds of miles and take several days out of their lives just to have a legal medical procedure is, in its final sense, a punishment on women for the mortal sin of seeking an abortion. But there is a still worse sin among the conservative ranks, the one eternal sin. If the GOP had its way and every pregnancy were brought to full term, what then? Well that would just be the beginning of the hardships that face the women and children who are so unfortunate to be poor. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the GOP has declared war on high quality, low cost health care. By defunding food assistance programs the GOP is waging war on those families it required to come into being. By defunding the schools the GOP is shackling that family, and by cutting any number of new holes in the safety net, the GOP condemn countless to the impossible task of pulling themselves by their own bootstraps.

But the human spirit is an incredible thing, and every once in a great while some exceptional individual will climb out of poverty, in spite of every hurdle and every disadvantage that was unjustly put in their way by conservatives who shut down every possible means of advancement. And that exceptional individual will be held up by the conservatives as proof positive that all the assistance programs aren’t necessary for those who just grit their teeth and try real hard, even as so many go hungry and shiver in the cold, all while trying to coo yet another unwanted child into a restless sleep. The fact that all these problems still exist doesn’t matter in the least, because the GOP has done its task in punishing the one eternal sin, that of poverty. If there is one group that earns more scorn than any other it is those moochers, the 47%, the takers, parasites and leeches. I am sure that there is a conservative pundit or politician, who can wax poetic about how I have the motives all wrong, that the failed conservative policies are actually so effective in lifting people out of poverty, but it’s all the same innuendo and euphemism that has let them already enact these terrible policies in the first place. The exact same policies that, when they are spoken plainly by an offensive, loud, ignorant brute like Trump, instinctively make people on all sides of the spectrum react with truly righteous disgust. But it’s not enough to identify bad actors or to be repulsed by bad policy. We need to look at what works in actually helping people and combatting the problem, which only begins by being honest about our own iniquities.