If we have principles, we can’t support Trump or Hillary.
Where is the party of simple human decency?
Back in 2012, at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., a 45-year-old transgendered, biologically intact male named Colleen Francis insisted on undressing in front of a woman and girls as young as six years old in a pool locker room. “A second report filed by an outside swim coach stated having ‘observed Colleen sitting with her legs open with her male genitalia showing’ in the sauna.”
“This is not 1959 Alabama. We don’t call the police for drinking from the wrong water fountain,” Ms. Francis told local media.
After a great deal of public outcry, the school came up with a solution: It curtained off a small area in the locker room for the little girls and worried women to use if they wanted.
Ever since I read this story, I’ve wondered what would happen if Colleen Francis, or other transgendered biological males, had decided to go behind that curtain too.
Girls at Virginia Public High School in Minnesota apparently have now found that out. Eleven families from the small-town high school have filed a lawsuit after the female athletes were routinely exposed to naked transgender males, allegedly sometimes twerking, grinding, and pretending to be strippers.
RELATED: President Obama’s Transgender Proclamation Is Far Broader and More Dangerous than You Think
Sounds like a hostile school environment to me, one that would certainly discourage girls from equal access to athletic activities as required by Title IX. So, how did the school handle the girls’ complaints? Officials told girls who were bothered that they could use a secondary locker room in the basement of the school. “Plaintiff B and nearly half the junior varsity squad changed in the secondary locker room,” according to the lawsuit.
One plaintiff was told she could use a vacant boys’ basketball locker room for privacy. But then a transgender student “walked into the boys’ basketball locker room while Girl Plaintiff A was in her underwear and removed his pants while he was near her and other girls who were also changing,” the lawsuit states. “This incident deeply upset Girl Plaintiff A. It signaled to her that there was no place in the school where she could preserve her privacy under the new policy.”
(Hat tip to Todd Starnes for being the first to cover this important lawsuit.)
RELATED: New Transgender Rules for Schools Are about Obama’s Culture War
A party of decency would provide a way for the transgender students to change or use a restroom with privacy. Decent people bend over backwards to try meet the needs of every student. But a party of decency would not decide that there is some fundamental right to expose yourself to the opposite sex in the name of transgender rights. A party of decency certainly would not tell every public school in America that it risks losing federal funding unless it invades girls’ privacy rights, as President Obama has done with Hillary Clinton’s endorsement.
This issue is only a symptom, of course. A decent person would never look a grieving mother in the face and blatantly lie to her about why her son died, as Hillary Clinton did, or tell a naval officer it’s okay for her to mishandle classified documents in order to protect her own political future.
A party of decency would not nominate a man such as Donald Trump, either.
I could say I long for a party of principle, but what is missing in America right now is the party of decency.
#related#I think this is why I’m so unmoved by the idea pushed by the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus, that in rallying around Trump we are somehow like the passengers who brought down Flight 93. They were decent men who gave their lives refusing to ally passively with evil.
“If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed ‘family values’; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order,” as Public Decius Mus writes, then we cannot be for Trump. Or Hillary, either.
— Maggie Gallagher is the author of four books on marriage and a longtime contributor to National Review.