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« on: March 31, 2016, 06:36:15 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 3-31-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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Mid-Day Digest
Mar. 31, 2016
THE FOUNDATION
“It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson (1781)
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
North Carolina’s Bathroom Wars1
By Jordan Candler
The North Carolina legislature is under immense scrutiny for overruling a Charlotte city ordinance that, come April 1, would have forced businesses to give transgender people special admission privileges in selecting dressing and restroom facilities. Talk about an April Fools' joke.
Predictably, the Leftmedia’s bias is showing. According to CBS News2, “The law Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed last week requires people to use multi-stall bathrooms that match their birth certificates at state agencies, schools and universities, even if that means forcing transgender people with heavy beards to use women’s rooms and putting people with feminine appearances in men’s rooms.” Quite frankly, this isn’t about placating the demands of “transgender people with heavy beards” or “people with feminine appearances.” It’s about protecting the wellbeing of otherwise healthy children. Besides, the law doesn’t say a man who undergoes surgery to remove his manhood can’t change his birth certificate.
That America is even having this debate is absurd, but even more fatuous is the angst it’s giving so-called LGBT pacifiers.
We begin with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who announced he intends not to honor the law and, in fact, to refuse to defend it against any challenge. According to Cooper, “Not only is this new law a national embarrassment, it will set North Carolina’s economy back if we don’t repeal it.”
That prompted Gov. McCrory to fire back, “When you are the state’s lawyer, you are a lawyer first and a politician second. Therefore, I encourage the Attorney General to reconsider his flawed logic. I am fulfilling my oath of office and we expect him to do the same.” He’s right. But just like the Obama Justice Department — which is constitutionally tasked with defending Rule of Law — declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, don’t expect much oath-keeping in the North Carolina AG’s office.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee have signed directives prohibiting government employees from visiting North Carolina on the taxpayers' dime. Cuomo declared, “As long as there is a law in North Carolina that creates the grounds for discrimination against LGBT people, I am barring non-essential state travel to that state.”
There are myriad issues at play here. Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson calls the blowback “textbook cultural cronyism3” and explains that, under the bill’s terms, “private schools, restaurants, stores, and businesses are free to establish whatever bathroom policies they’d like, but that access to government bathrooms will be determined primarily by biological sex.” That’s hardly what we would call “unfair,” but it’s precisely why leftists are deliberately misrepresenting the law as discriminatory. In their minds, the only “fair” law is one that subordinates our natural rights to their agenda. Anderson goes on to make this astute observation:
The NBA has said North Carolina’s law might make it move the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte. The NBA threat over the All-Star Game is particularly amusing. The NBA (and its sister organization, the WNBA) apparently think bathroom access shouldn’t be based on biology, but basketball leagues should. The NBA and WNBA, of course, are free to have gender-neutral basketball teams — and to have gender-neutral bathrooms at those games. That they are threatening the state to impose a policy that even they haven’t voluntarily adopted is the height of hypocrisy.
Giving further credence to one of the fundamental arguments conservatives have made against placating transgender individuals, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins writes4: “Entire companies are threatening to pull out of the state because Governor McCrory refused to risk the safety of his entire state for less than one half of one percent of the country’s population. And, it turns out, he may have done more to protect the people who identify as transgendered than most liberals have. Just this week, a transgendered woman was raped in one of these new unisex bathrooms — at an LGBT landmark no less. At the Stonewall Inn in New York City, the liberals' monument to ‘tolerance,’ one of their own was attacked. Even here, at this bastion of sexual confusion, these policies are hurting the people they were designed to ‘help!’” Considering most students struggling with transgenderism eventually move on, the question has to be asked: What’s the objective? Perkins adds:
According to the American College of Pediatricians, the Left’s agenda is child abuse! The harms of this gender ideology, which the ACP lays out … in its statement of opposition, can destroy a person for life. What sends the wrong message are policies that try to keep children frozen in this fleeting phase of uncertainty. A full 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls “eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.”
North Carolina got this one right, and other states should take note. The best way conservatives can respond is by emulating Gov. McCrory and forge ahead amid intense opposition — and there will be much of it from the Rainbow Mafia. As Anderson says, “What Americans need now is strong political leadership to stand up to the cronyist bullying and do what’s best for the American people.” That takes principled steadfastness. Are you listening, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal5?
Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column
Read Are America’s Best Days Ahead?6, on the right perspective on the future.
If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here7.
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists8
Larry Elder: Why the Anger? Obamanomics Has Failed9
George Will: Libya Debacle Undermines Clinton’s Foreign Policy Credential10
For more, visit Right Opinion11.
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
CA’s Minimum Wage Hike Will Harm the Poor12
Thanks to lobbying from unions and pressure from the Golden State’s leftist lawmakers, California will raise its minimum wage requirements until it hits $15-an-hour by 2022. The proponents of the policy argue that the workers at the low end of the pay scale deserve higher wages — a way to make a career of flipping burgers. After all, it’s the moral thing to do, right?
Not so fast. The Washington Examiner’s Jason Russell argues that California raising its minimum wage to double that of the federal level is the most immoral thing the state could do. “Consider three methods of reducing poverty: giving to charity, increasing taxes for welfare programs and hiking the minimum wage,” Russell wrote13, “Of the three, the minimum wage hike is the only one that primarily involves effectively making someone else pay more.”
Free-market think tank American Action Forum predicts14 a $15 minimum wage will destroy 700,000 jobs in California. Already, the minimum wage experiment has yielded bitter economic fruit for other regions that implemented the policy. Seattle, which is on its way to a $15 minimum wage, lost15 1,300 restaurant jobs from January to June 2015.
Businesses ordered by the government to pay more for employees become choosier in hiring help and slower to do so in general. The person who takes the order at a fast food joint? An automated ordering system will pay for itself, and take no sick days. The first people to be affected by raising the minimum wage are always workers with low skills, youth and racial minorities — the very people California’s bleeding heart “progressives” claim they’re trying to help. There’s no morality in that. |
