Although you may have thought the Republican presidential race bottomed out with the “hand size” tiff earlier this year, the GOP has gone onto the toilet, moving from its top LGBT question of 2015, “Would you attend their weddings?” to the new and improved 2016 installment, “Would you let them use your bathroom?”
Yes, Donald Trump said Thursday, Caitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice in Trump Tower. That’s when North Carolina’s HB2 erupted on the 2016 stage and Trump became an unwitting champion of fairness by managing to say something gobsmackingly reasonable about the law. Noting that the state is “paying a big price” for dictating which bathroom people must use, he marveled at why lawmakers had acted:
“There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom they feel is appropriate, there has been so little trouble.”
Wow, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. In truth, this whole “men in women’s bathrooms” was never even a thing before right-wing conservatives planted it in people’s minds.
Raise your hands, ladies, if you went to the restroom thinking, “I hope a man won’t be in there.” Yeah, that’s what I thought. And yet that’s been the rationale that social conservatives sold Houston voters on last November followed by lawmakers in several states this year. But North Carolina has the distinction of being the first state to actually adopt a statewide dictatory bathroom policy.
Now just to be clear, Trump’s no LGBT advocate. Under immediate attack from Ted Cruz over his totally reasonable assertion, Trump walked it back Friday, saying he thinks “local communities and states should make the decision.” But he also reiterated his assessment that the law is causing “problems.” That’s because Trump is a creature of business and, whatever his many failings may be, he’s smart enough to know an economic calamity when he sees one. So in this instance, he came down on the side of business, which just happens to be holding the hand of LGBT America right now.
Naturally, Ted Cruz was quick to follow suit with a glimpse of his own economic vision for the nation, which is essentially apocalyptic. He’s too busy claiming the mantle of holy ignorance to worry about jobs or businesses.
“Common Sense:,” he tweeted, “grown men shouldn't be in bathrooms w/ little girls. @realDonaldTrump told us he could be PC, but wow.”
Correction: common sense is trusting everyone to make appropriate bathroom decisions. But Cruz’s insistence that HB2 is good law offers a window into his America. It’s one where economic prosperity and jobs take a back seat to robbing LGBT Americans of as much human dignity as possible because that is what’s most important.
On Glenn Beck’s radio show Thursday, Cruz bragged about his familiarity with “child molesters,” “pedophiles,” and “people who abused little kids” while touting the importance of HB2.
"These are serious issues, and when you deal with people who are repulsive perverts and criminals, you need to—there are some bad people in the world, and we shouldn’t be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom with grown adult men.”
Yes, they are serious issues, Ted, which is exactly why we don’t paranoid lunatics looking for what conservative columnist Kathleen Parker called “a non-solution to a non-problem.” As she noted, predators will neither be enabled nor stopped by a law like HB2. But Ted Cruz doesn’t care because he is the walking personification of the culture wars and he would bleed an economy dry in the name of demonizing LGBT Americans in order to win elections.
The best we can say about Trump, by comparison, is that he isn’t the raging homophobe Cruz is, which hardly makes him a friend of the LGBT community.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham was forced to pick sides between a candidate he believes is dangerous but was making some sense, and a candidate he despises only slightly less who was talking gibberish, Graham chose sense.
Thank goodness for that confirmation.
Ted Cruz doubled down on Friday, convinced he has a winner on his hands.
“In the last 48 hours,” he said, “Donald Trump has come out for grown men going into the bathroom with little girls.”
Translation: In the last 48 hours, Ted Cruz has come out for tanking the economy, North Carolina style. Because much like the state’s GOP lawmakers, he prizes religious zealotry at any expense.
Addendum: Ted Cruz now has an ad out accusing Trump of being part of the “PC Police” for his remarks.
Kerry Eleveld’s book about how LGBT activists created a political tipping point during Obama’s presidency is called, Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.