Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/16/2016

                       Accepting the unacceptable

One way to look at the current controversy over bathroom rules is to step back and take in the big picture. The very use of those 4 words, “controversy over bathroom rules,” says a lot about the decline of public standards as I see it. There is nothing controversial about a bathroom that is a single-occupant room with a locking doorknob having signage that allows any “mammalian biped” to access the plumbing fixtures for the plumbing on said biped’s body.

The reality is that all, and I mean all, “mammalian bipeds” are born with either male or female “parts.” That is called biology and would seem to be, as the cultural and political left put it endlessly when it suits their issue, “settled science.” Letting a person “identify” with “parts” not present at birth would—(cue the movie voice-over) in a world where basic “facts of life” were not subject to interpretation—get he/she laughed out of public discourse.

Such feeling-based accommodation of nature-defying preferences would, in such a world, not be accorded any further attention beyond being 1) the butt of ridicule summed up by 2) “you must be joking” and 3) “if you are serious, you need counseling and/or physical restraint until authorities can take you away.” The little signs on the doors that routinely show either the symbol for a man with pants or a woman with a skirt are apparently now to include a third figure: the ludicrous combination of a pant leg on one side and skirt on the other half.

Beyond that is the truly bizarre contention that such gender coin-tossing should determine whether a biologically confused/defiant man can walk into a public rest room for women with nothing but stall walls separating the toilets, or into a locker room with showers restricted to women and girls. A cartoon summed it up: on one side of the line representing the bathroom stall wall is a mom and her little daughter; on the other side is the figure of a man pulling himself up to peek over the top of the divider. It could just as well show him peeking through the small gaps around the door or using a mirror below the divider.

The “joke” is on all of us. It’s on the traditional majority that finds it outrageous to even devote any time or effort to pushing back on such insanity. That includes the need to write about it in a local newspaper in a conservative part of a “fruits and nuts” state like California where “moonbeam” Jerry Brown has or will make it the law of the land.

The sick joke is also on those liberals who’ve gone along with every loony idea foisted on society by the cultural, Marxist academic left because…political correctness, multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance or the latest iteration of their transformational “brave new world.” You see, the goofy idea factory for the left has no “off” position; you have gone along with the leftist position on each new issue—illegal/undocumented immigration, gun control, sentencing “reform,” socialized medicine, gay marriage, and now “transgender rights” (yet another made-up term). There will be no redoubt or sanctuary for you when the last vestige of traditional life is stripped from you and you family, your occupation, your recreation or your money.

That’s a nice little personally abundant lifestyle you have. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it while your relative wealth (vis-à-vis the underprivileged masses in foreign lands), is taxed by the United Nations to improve their standard of living. So sorry about those astronomical energy costs, America, but you just didn’t recognize that you and your wealth have been acquired at the expense of environmental degradation through carbon-intensive technology, making the “third world” nations suffer.

You want your children brought up to have standards and preferences based on their best interests? Moreover, you’ve done responsible things and made the right decisions—finished school, taken any job you could until you could get the job you wanted, used no drugs, had no out-of-wedlock babies and moved your family to a better part of town for their safety and education.

While you have done those things and more to advance and build a better life for yourself and your loved ones, you haven’t, as our cultural Marxist-in-chief and his ideological cohorts would say, really “built that.” White privilege, capitalistic exploitation and inattention to “the needs of the village” account for what you have and the lower classes don’t. They, the cultural and political left want what you have; at the least they just don’t want you to have it or to think you’ve earned or deserve it.

You may think it a stretch from “transgender rights” to economic redistribution and forced conformity to the ideological demands of the left but, as H.L. Richardson described in “Confrontational Politics,” the left uses every issue to its organizational advantage. He described the sausage that loses a slice or two, never to be restored. The inexorable advance of progressivism allows for occasional retreat to accommodate the sensitivities of the majority, while simultaneously consolidating power and support for the next battle. Margaret Thatcher described it as “the ratcheting” tighter of leftist (Labor) policies that never get fully undone.

I recall the saying of a German clergyman that those who failed to object to the persecution of each group by the Nazis, found no one left to defend them when the ire of the state turned their direction. Christians yesterday, traditionalists today, who’s next? You will not be left alone and you will be made to care the way they want you to care.