Is it possible that our legislators are trying their best to make Illinois the California of the Midwest, without the mountains or beautiful weather? Our Governors, most certainly, are competing. Both have wildly inflated egos, both ignored their own directives during the height of the pandemic, and both have designs on the White House.

We already have many other similarities as well. Our largest cities are infested with crime and plagued with Soros backed prosecutors. English language and math proficiency for all students also is bleak for both states, although Illinois is worse. California is 50% and 34%, while in Illinois it is 29.9% and 25.8% for English and Math. And both states are losing population in record numbers. The 2020 figures show California losing 182,000 of its population of 39.5 million and Illinois has dropped 104,000 of its 12.5 million total population.

Instead of addressing these and other serious issues, our august lawmakers are trying to stay neck and neck with the Golden State on woke bathroom policies. Our General Assembly just passed an amendment (HB 1286) to the “Equitable Restroom Act,” that allows that “[a]ny multiple-occupancy restroom may be converted into an all-gender multiple-occupancy restroom.” It goes on to describe a variety of requirements for partitioned stalls and urinals. It was passed by a vote of 60 to 40, all Republicans voting against it.

Why?

California passed a similar bill that was signed into law by Newsom last year. The reasoning for the legislation was thin. One explanation was that parents could take their opposite sex minor child into the restroom with them . . . But, wait. Hasn’t that already been going on everywhere, forever?

Then there was the explanation that it allowed for more equitable gender inclusion. Isn’t that a separate argument? Haven’t we already been fighting that issue as it relates to gender identity, allowing people to use the restroom of the sex they identify with rather than their biological sex? I guess it answers the problem of the non-binary. If you don’t identify with either sex, where do you go? Literally, where do you go? Voila, an all-gender restroom.

Some pundits claim that the sex separated restroom prudery didn’t begin until the Victorian era, although many also mention that Paris began using separate public restrooms in the 1700’s.  What nobody mentioned is that throughout most of the world there were no public facilities other than outhouses, alleys and the great outdoors. Ancient Rome had public toilets, but I could not find any definitive source that could say one way or the other if facilities were separate for men and women. Logic indicates they were, since Roman baths were used by men and women, but there were separate designated times for men and for women to use them. Even in Rome, modesty prevailed.

Harvard Law Professor and columnist for the New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, has a more practical reason for combined restrooms. Saving time. In an article she wrote in 2016, Gersen recounted the occasion when she took the bar exam at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. She had to go to the restroom, but the ladies room had an “enormous line.” Instead of waiting, she walked into the men’s room, where there was no line, used one of the many empty stalls and expeditiously returned to successfully complete her exam. It wasn’t fair, according to Gerson, that the women had a long line while the men had none. So, she corrected the injustice. Professor Gerson observes:

Today, men and women, not assumed to be only heterosexual, are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some exceptions, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation? When men, gay or straight, can stand shoulder to shoulder at urinals without a second thought, is there much to back up the view that men and women must not pee or poop next to one another, especially if closed stalls would shield them from view?

Does modesty have no value, privacy and safety no utility, professor?

Why are our legislators devoting time on such issues as this? Is this really something that a majority of Illinoisans want? An identical bill was passed 63-43 in the Illinois House in 2021, but was not voted on in the Senate. Why bring it up again? Why do people with such strange priorities keep getting elected? And why is this a political issue?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your local state senator to ask him/her to vote against this legislation when it comes up for a vote on the Senate floor sometime this session. Urge them to reject this foolish woke agenda that fails to recognize biological facts. Ask them to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all Illinois citizens.

Please, speak out against this destructive bill.

It seems an odd place for woke ideology and degenerating ideas of gender, sexuality, and basic biology to play out, but even public restrooms are not safe with leftists in the Illinois state house. Even as some businesses and schools have opted to make available unisex bathroom facilities, this has not been required by law. But that may be about to change.

Wednesday, February 22,  State Representative Katie Stuart (D-Collinsville) of Illinois’ 112th district will bring HB 1286 before the House Human Services Committee. Among other things, this bill would require that in places of public accommodation—both new construction and buildings undergoing an expansion of more than 50 percent of their existing space—there must be an all-gender, multi-occupancy restroom with signage indicating such. If the restroom designated for all genders is located “adjacent or in proximity” to another multiple-occupancy restroom, that too must be designated for all genders.

State health and building inspectors would be responsible for making sure buildings comply with these regulations, with the health department setting rules to implement the changes. Every Illinois county board would also be required to submit to the General Assembly a public restrooms report by the end of 2023.

As written, this bill represents ongoing big-government overreach into what should be straightforward building requirements based on biology and statistics or, said another way, the SCIENCE progressives are so fond of wielding when it serves their purposes. Beyond this blatant use of regulation to advance a social agenda, there are other, less obvious potential consequences if it is passed into law:

1. Churches, synagogues, and mosques are not typically treated as places of public accommodation, however, if they rent their space for weddings or other events, they could run afoul of this legislation. For houses of worship that teach a view of gender that, until very recently, was not in question, freedom of speech and religion would come under threat. Churches, synagogues, and mosques could face having to decide between faithfulness to their religious texts and bowing to Springfield.

2. Besides the risk HB 1286 poses to religious liberty, the cost of such regulation must also be considered. With Illinois in dire fiscal shape, it’s amazing that Rep. Stuart can, with a straight face, put forth a bill that will require state agencies and county offices to spend more money on what amounts to no more than the regulatory expression of cultural and emotional whims. If passed, this law would also place an even greater financial burden on business owners who already struggle under Illinois’ growth-killing regulations.

3. Apart from the clear Constitutional, legal, and financial pitfalls of such a bill, it presents real dangers to the individuals using these all-gender bathrooms. In multiple cases, most recently in a Virginia high school, we have seen the worst-case scenario of opening up to biological males what should be women’s private spaces in the name of tolerance and equality. The current cultural trend toward eliminating biological sex disproportionately impacts women and girls, endangering and effectively erasing them. This ill-conceived bill is no exception.

As the nation continues to be swept along by the godless, nonsensical transgender wave, parents, grandparents, and concerned citizens of all stripes must stand up and say, “no further.” Legislators may seek to advance laws that reflect the flavor of the moment, but as believers in a God who created man and woman in His own image and called them “good,” we can and must hold them accountable for anything that says otherwise.

** UPDATE (2/21/2023): The Illinois House Human Services Committee passed this bill out of committee by a partisan vote of 6 to 3. You can watch the short 6 minute video of the hearing at this YouTube link.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your local state representative to ask him/her to vote against this legislation when it comes up for a vote on the House floor sometime this session. Urge them to reject this foolish woke agenda that fails to recognize biological facts. Ask them to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all Illinois citizens.

Please, speak out against this destructive bill.

Even as I write these words, different cities in America are considering dangerous and irrational laws that impose unfair and potentially dangerous burdens on the vast majority of citizens, all in name of helping a tiny number of deeply confused individuals. When will we learn?

To put it simply, you are guaranteeing trouble when you effectively make public bathrooms and locker rooms gender neutral. It is an experiment in social madness, and it is completely without justification, no matter how much we care about men and women who struggle with gender identity issues.

Many of us in the pro-family movement have warned for years that so-called anti-discrimination laws that include “gender identity” and “gender expression” as categories open the door to a host of potential problems and abuses.

First, these laws do not consider the needs of a multitude of women and children who will feel quite uncomfortable when a biological male comes walking into their bathroom or locker room, understandably so. (Note to LGBTQ activists: The fact that a biological male dresses like a female does not make women and children feel any more comfortable.)

Second, there is no way to keep heterosexual predators out of the ladies’ rooms, since a heterosexual male could simply pose as a woman to satisfy his voyeuristic (or worse) desires.

[Two weeks ago] in Seattle, “A man undressed in a women’s locker room, citing a new state rule that allows people to choose a bathroom based on gender identity.”

As reported by Krem.com, “It was a busy time at Evans Pool around 5:30pm Monday February 8. The pool was open for lap swim. According to Seattle Parks and Recreation, a man wearing board shorts entered the women’s locker room and took off his shirt. Women alerted staff, who told the man to leave, but he said ‘the law has changed and I have a right to be here.’”

Was he transgender? Heterosexual? Something else? Does it matter? If he feels he should be able to use the women’s locker room, he can, and no one can stop him.

In the words of pool regular Aldan Shank, “Sort of works against the point they’re trying to make. They’re causing people to feel exposed and vulnerable with the intention of reducing people feeling exposed and vulnerable.”

When I posted this report on my Facebook page, a woman named Kati commented, “This is VERY real. This new policy that was recently adopted by our local YMCA in WA allows for people to use whatever locker room they self-identify with. Just two weeks ago a boy around the age of 13 walked right into the girls side of the women’s locker room. All he did was sit down and scroll through his phone. Little girls where surprised when they came in from showering with their towels wrapped around them to see him sitting there. My daughter was one of those girls. This policy opens the door to those who have malicious intent.”

What kind of lunacy is this?

Last year, at a Planet Fitness gym in Midland, Michigan, Yvette Cormier was in the ladies’ locker room when a man, dressed as a woman, entered the locker room. According to local ABC News, “Cormier, who had been a Planet Fitness member for two months, said she went to the front desk immediately. The man at the desk told her that Planet Fitness policy is ‘whatever gender you feel you are, that’s the locker room you’re allowed to go in,’ she said.

When Cormier warned other members about the Planet Fitness policy, her own membership was revoked.

Even more alarming, in 2012, in Olympia, Washington, female high-school students sharing a college campus swimming pool were shocked to see a naked, 45-year-old male student who identifies as “Colleen” sitting in their sauna. (The police report stated that “she” was exposing “her male genitalia.”)

The girls were traumatized and the parents outraged, but college officials said they could not do anything because of state policies against gender-identity discrimination: “‘The college has to follow state law,’ Evergreen spokesman Jason Wettstein told ABC News affiliate KOMO. ‘The college cannot discriminate based on the basis of gender identity. Gender identity is one of the protected things in discrimination law in this state.’”

Adding to the insanity is the fact that it was subsequently discovered online that Colleen also identifies as a lesbian and is strongly attracted to women, in other words, just like most heterosexual males. Yet it is perfectly legal for Colleen to sit in a sauna with naked teenage girls.

Who can possibly justify abuses like this?

Last October it was reported that, “The University of Toronto (U of T) is temporarily changing its policy on gender-neutral bathrooms after two reports of voyeurism in a student residence.

“Two women showering in Whitney Hall, a residence at U of T’s University College, reported they saw a cellphone reach over the shower-stall dividers in an attempt to record them, in two different incidents, police Const. Victor Kwong told The Toronto Star.”

But of course. Is anyone surprised?

Recently, before speaking at a chapel service for a Christian middle school and high school, I stopped in the restroom, which, I discovered, was in the elementary school wing of the building.

As I walked out, three little boys walked in, perhaps 6 years old.

I thought to myself, “How could any adult possibly think that it is fair to these little boys to have a confused little girl use their bathroom, or a confused little boy use the girls’ room?” And how could any adult possibly think that it was fine for a confused (or opportunistic) teenage boy to share a locker room with teenage girls?

Yet in schools across the nation, this is hardly a theoretical question. In fact, in an extraordinary example of government overreach, last November a headlineannounced: “Department of Education orders school to allow boys to use girls’ locker rooms, showers.”

It’a time we say enough!

I urge every man or woman of conscience and decency to stand against these laws while, at the same time, working to help those who are gender-confused get to the root of their struggles.

This social madness must stop.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

A couple of months ago, Deerfield High School (DHS) in Deerfield, Illinois quietly changed a multi-stall girls restroom to a co-ed restroom. Worse still the administration has not notified either parents or students. Rumors are circulating that the administration chose secrecy over transparency in order to avoid controversy.

This is not a single-occupancy restroom, nor is it a girls restroom restricted to actual girls and boys who wish they were girls. Rather, it is a co-ed restroom euphemistically called an “All Gender Restroom,” presumably to divert attention from the reality of what the administration has created. They have created a co-ed restroom that girls and boys may use together.

Of course, schools that allow only gender-dysphoric students to use multi-stall opposite-sex restrooms, have in reality created co-ed restrooms too. In reality, it makes no difference if the boy in the girls restroom dislikes his body and cross-dresses or likes his body and dresses normally. In both cases schools are creating de facto co-ed restrooms.

But DHS has gone a step further than most schools have yet dared to go in the steady march to obliterate respect for and recognition of the nature, meaning, and importance of objective, immutable sexual differentiation. DHS has skipped over the interim step of allowing only gender-dysphoric students to share restrooms with opposite-sex peers. No intermediate step for the “progressive” science-denying administration at DHS. All boys and girls may avail themselves of this co-ed restroom.

It should be noted that during the day this restroom is in a remote part of the high school and therefore a more convenient place for a sexual assault. This restroom, however, is located near the pool and gyms, so during public events like swim meets, basketball games, and pep rallies, it is easily available to any and all community members. A high school girl or a younger sister of a high school girl may be in a stall when a strange adult male enters.

A faculty member posed this question to an administrator about the brave new bathroom world in which restrooms and locker rooms are invaded by opposite-sex students: What would happen if a girl student said she didn’t want to share a restroom with a boy. The administrator said the school would make separate accommodations for the girl.

Our hapless neighbors in Alberta, Canada are willing to make similar accommodations for the properly ordered desires of girls who don’t want to shower and use restrooms with those whose sex they don’t share. In the “Guidelines for Best Practices: Creating Learning Environments That Respect Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and Gender Expressions,” the Alberta government wrote that “A student who objects to sharing a washroom or change-room with a student who is trans or gender-diverse is offered an alternative facility.”

I told my millennial children (who happen to be DHS alumni) about these bizarre statements. Their first response was incredulity, and then they worked out the absurd implications of such fecklessness. First, one girl will object to using a locker room with a boy and will receive a special accommodation. Next, so many girls will express opposition to using locker rooms with actual boys that schools will have to create restrooms exclusively for actual girls, at which point gender-dysphoric boys will complain that they deeply desire to change and shower with girls, insisting on their “right” to use the new girls-only restroom. And then Leftists will step in to stop all this nonsense, claiming that students have no right to privacy based on objective, immutable biological sex.

Alternatively, parents and their representatives on school boards could insist steadfastly and passionately that restroom and locker room policies and practices recognize and respect immutable sex differences.

Right now Leftists are demanding that schools create de facto co-ed restrooms but will grudgingly permit schools to limit the commingling of sexes to gender-dysphoric students and will grudgingly allow schools to require gender-dysphoric students to use private stalls for excretory functions and changing clothes. But those are merely transitional accommodations.

The next step in their truly wicked effort to “eliminate the binary” will be to demand that gender-dysphoric students be allowed unrestricted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and showers, which is to say, no more requirements that gender-dysphoric students use private stalls for excretory functions, changing, and showering.

Then comes the coup de grace. Leftists will demand that all facilities be open to any sex, including those who are not gender-dysphoric. Once society has allowed objectively male persons unrestricted access to women’s private facilities, there will remain no rational justification for prohibiting non-gender-dysphoric males from using opposite-sex facilities.

Kind readers, if you think this is an absurd line of thinking, you have not been paying attention to how “LGBTQQIAP” activists have been using incrementalism successfully for the past 45 years. These are their pernicious goals, and they count on the ignorance and cowardice of Christians—including church leaders, many of whom refuse to lead. While conservatives cower, stubbornly ignoring warnings, “LBBTQQIAP” activists and their accomplices scurry onward, ten steps ahead and bold as brass.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.