When the Equitable Restrooms bill was introduced in Springfield, a familiar pattern started to emerge. As IFI readers may know, HB 1286 legalizes “all-gender, multiple-occupancy restrooms” in sporting complexes, stadiums, entertainment centers, conference centers, and other big venues in Illinois. Yes, “all-gender” is just what it sounds like – males and females using the same multiple-occupancy restroom at the same time, anytime. There are urinals, stalls, and partitions in co-ed bathrooms.

So our first reaction at IFI was the same as yours and your neighbor’s. Don’t they know these restrooms will be places where rapes and crimes will occur? Don’t they know that at the very least women will lose their privacy when men are in these restrooms? Don’t they know that a 16-year-old girl who needs to use the restroom is vulnerable to men who will frequent these places with evil intentions? So why would we want to create all-gender bathrooms, especially since there have been crimes committed by more than a few men in women’s restrooms in recent years?

Those are all good questions. Unfortunately, those questions aren’t at the center of debate in Springfield — yet. Like I said at the beginning, a familiar pattern has emerged.

The first complaint by the sponsor and those on the left who support this bill is that HB 1286 doesn’t really do what people think it does. The bill only legalizes and permits, not mandates, these restrooms. Well, IFI readers know this. We wrote about it last month. But some people hearing about this for the first time wrongly thought the bill mandated the restrooms, so the far-left’s been painting the picture that ALL of us are mistaken. And they’re making that the central issue of the debate. If that sounds familiar, you’re right.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan asked, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” Satan placed doubt in Eve’s mind that she might be completely mistaken.  That’s the left’s strategy as well – a lie leading to doubt. “All opponents think this bill requires these restrooms to be built. Therefore since it doesn’t, it’s okay to pass the bill.”

We know the bill just permits these restrooms… for the time being at least. But we also know they’re going to be dangerous and that’s why we’re opposed. The left then goes to the second tactic – temptation.

As Satan said, “Well, God knows if you ate of that fruit, your eyes would be opened and you would be like God.” Hmmm…..doesn’t sound that bad, almost tempting. So Eve takes the fruit and gives it to Adam and they sin.

The left once again draws attention away from the truth by saying, “The bill merely provides the framework on how to construct these restrooms. All we’re doing is making sure that if someone does construct these restrooms, they need to do it a certain way for safety reasons.” That might sound more reasonable, but it completely masks the question of ‘Why do we need to provide the framework in the first place?’  What they are trying to avoid is that all-gender multiple occupancy restrooms are currently illegal. And common sense tells us that they’re unsafe. And there’s no amount of framework that will make them safe.

So believe it or not, legislators are not yet publicly debating your privacy or safety in legalizing these restrooms; they’re merely talking about providing the framework for construction of these restrooms which will inevitably also provide the framework for crimes against women and girls.

Even California hasn’t done what Illinois is proposing. Why? It’s unsafe. The closest California has come is proposing a single-use “transgender bathroom” in every school. They would keep the boys and girls restrooms as they are.

Christians are called to love God and love one another. We defend God’s Word here on earth and simply repeat God’s loving reasons why we should not do this or that as it will harm God’s people. We also proclaim what God says would make things better for all people.  In the Capitol, that often means opposing others who feel they are doing the right thing in their own minds.  The hard part is taking all of the slings and arrows that come from intentional misrepresentations, lies, and deceit. And it’s no fun being mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at for standing up for Christian values in this culture war. History repeats this pattern over and over for us Christians. It’s the path Jesus endured to the point of death on a cross. Yes, carried out by those He created and came to save, no less.

But the fact that it’s no surprise allows us to recognize it for what it is and forge ahead with our playbook – which is Scripture – to love God and others, pray for those who persecute us, and to defend God’s Word here on earth. So please continue to do those things.

There are many reasonable, albeit timid, legislators who need you to help them stand up against these assaults on basic values. And please know that the witness slips you filled out on-line against HB 1286 really do witness to many in our Capitol against the lie that gender is chosen by people rather than by God. (“So God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them” – Gen. 1:27 and “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart” – Jer. 1:5)

Finally, please know that your prayers are felt and invaluable to our cause. We at IFI appreciate them. I pray every day for the far-left – for their health and welfare and their coming closer to God. This is the same prayer I say for myself and my family. This is a spiritual battle, after all.  Do we have the votes to stop HB 1286? I don’t know. I do know this, though. We have a God Who has already won the victory over Satan, both in this world and the next. Which is why God never asks us to be successful. Rather, God only asks us to be faithful to Him – both in our private lives and public capacities.

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, especially women and girls.

Please, speak out against this destructive bill.

In case you haven’t heard, Walgreens has revised its restroom-usage policy for patrons at the request of the ACLU of Southern California. No longer will restrooms correspond to objective, immutable biological sex. From now on, restroom usage will correspond to the subjective, internal, deeply held feelings of patrons about their maleness and/or femaleness. As I’ve written multiple times, we’re moving to a revolutionary cultural place in which there will be co-ed private spaces everywhere, which means no private spaces anywhere.

The “butch”-appearing lesbian at the center of the Walgreens kerfuffle tried to use the women’s restroom, but apparently due to her masculine appearance (though she is not “transgender”), she was–suprise, surprise–mistaken for a man and told she couldn’t use the women’s restroom.

Because she “had to go,” she “used a stall in the men’s restroom” while “men used the urinals next to” her. Here’s the most interesting part of the story: She said, “This… was very humiliating for me and I felt uncomfortable.”

Did you hear that? She felt humiliated and uncomfortable by having to share a restroom with persons of the opposite sex. And she was in a stall.

It’s regrettable that this happened to her, but this is a cultural mess of the Left’s making. It’s the logical consequence of the nonsensical and anarchical sexuality ideology they have foisted on America.

When it comes to sex-segregated spaces, we can no longer rely on appearances or the honesty and decency of strangers. Even 10 years ago, “butch” women would have been able to use women’s private spaces. People would simply have trusted that the masculine-appearing person in the women’s restroom was a “butch” woman—not a man. But no longer. Trust and decency are gone. Now Walgreens has changed its policy, so many more men and women will be humiliated and uncomfortable by being forced to share restrooms with opposite-sex persons.

Good job Walgreens. You and Meehan have just made the experience of humiliation and discomfort universal.

The video above features the justifiably humiliated Jessie Meehan (For those who may not think Meehan looks masculine because she’s wearing makeup, please note this is a promotional photo taken by the ACLU of Southern California. We have no idea exactly how she appeared at Walgreens. Moreover, some men now wear makeup.)

Remember Meehan’s words about feeling humiliated and uncomfortable when your children’s schools try to force your daughters and sons to share private spaces with opposite-sex persons.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to Walgreens’ corporate executives to express civilly your objections to their new policy to allow men and women to use opposite-sex restroom facilities in all stores. You may want to point out that biological sex is objective and immutable, whereas “gender identity” is neither. And ask them why they believe men who “identify” as women should not have to use restrooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share, but women should have to use restrooms with those whose sex they don’t share.

You can also send a Tweet directly to them @Walgreens.

Please note: 2ndVote.com ranks Walgreens at a deplorable 1.6 in support of liberal causes.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/The-Walgreens-Kerfuffle.mp3

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Written by Chris Freund

In case you haven’t heard, apparently, despite nearly a year’s worth of scoffing denials by the retailer’s officials, Target isn’t doing so well.

Paint me shocked!

Plummeting sales and stock can be blamed on the weather only so many times before any thinking person starts to suspect that perhaps there’s more here than we’re being told.

Now comes a story in the Wall Street Journal where sources with Target claim that the announcement about a policy allowing men in women’s restrooms in the name of tolerance was never actually approved by the boss.  It was just a blog post that got a little out of hand.  And, oh, the CEO now claims he wouldn’t have approved the announcement because he thought, well, just maybe, there might be a backlash.

Ya think?

Of course, the CEO and others, along with the media and even many market “experts” claimed for the past year that there has been no backlash and that Target’s plummeting sales and stocks are due to the weather or other unusual market forces.  Weather and market forces that weren’t, however, having any effect on Target’s biggest competitor, Walmart.  Odd.

And that $20 million plan to add private restrooms to stores had nothing at all to do with the backlash that wasn’t really happening.  Just move along…

Now, I’m not a big fan of “boycotts” in general, and measuring their impact is pretty near impossible.  But you have to admit that when 1.5 million people say they aren’t going to shop someplace anymore, it might have a bit of an impact.  And that doesn’t include those who may have decided to not shop there but never signed any petition or pledge.  Regardless, the fact that the retailer’s sales have dropped in every quarter since the announcement can’t be simple coincidence.  Apparently, now, a year later, officials are starting to admit it.

Target’s biggest worry?  Those who figured out they never needed Target in the first place, and discovered online shopping at Amazon.  Not sure there’s a blog post correction that can fix that.

This article was originally posted at The Family Foundation blog.

Written by David French

This is surely one of the strangest tweet exchanges I’ve ever seen. Here’s CNN’s Christopher Cuomo responding to a person who asks, “What do you tell a 12 year old girl who doesn’t want to see a penis in the locker room?” His answer?

Not long ago, if school policies purposefully exposed girls to male genitals, they’d be subject to a backbreaking sexual harassment lawsuit. Suddenly, however, “tolerance” looks a lot like indecent exposure, and indecent exposure is what freedom looks like. This is beyond strange. I’m certain Cuomo would still object to a member of the football team walking straight into a girl’s locker room and disrobing, but he not only doesn’t object to the exact same anatomical features if they’re attached to a trans “girl,” he condems those who feel uncomfortable.

If the declaration that “preteen girls shouldn’t see penis at school” doesn’t resonate, I wonder if there’s really any hope for a common moral language when discussing the sexual revolution. In this circumstance, not even consent — the final moral firewall — matters. We used to be told that boys and girls should shielded from unwelcome sexual images. Now we’re told that they can be exposed to genitalia even over their strenuous objection, and they’re intolerant if they argue otherwise. Extraordinary.

The left-wing intolerance on this point is so extreme that they condemn school officials who seek to protect trans kids by giving them their own, private facilities — places where they can change in complete privacy. Yet arrangements like this are characterized as cruel and heartless discrimination rather than the compassionate accommodation they so clearly are. There are ways to protect the rights to all parties to this cultural dispute, but when social engineering is the goal, compromise is out of the question.

This article was originally posted at National Review.

(Caution: Not for younger readers.)

According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a high school boy in the city of Virginia, Minnesota (near Duluth) who is pretending to be a girl and whom school administrators allow to invade the privacy of girls has been accused of engaging in vulgar sexual gestures in a girls’ locker room.

A group of girls uncomfortable changing with this boy present had sought from the administration the privacy to which they are entitled. Rather than require the biological-sex-rejecting boy to move to a single-occupancy restroom to change, the school suggested the girls move to an unused boys’ basketball locker room in an elementary school basement—which they did. The biological-sex-rejecting boy soon followed them, and on one occasion lifted up his dress and “twerked” in front of girls who were wearing only their underwear.

Todd Starnes reports that the suit alleges the following:

• Student X commented on girls’ bodies while in the girls’ locker room, including asking Girl Plaintiff F about her bra size and asking her to “trade body parts” with him;

• Student X danced to loud music with sexually explicit lyrics while twerking, grinding and lifting up his skirt to reveal his underwear;

• Student X would dance in a sexually explicit manner “dancing like he was on a stripper pole” to songs with suggestive lyrics….

The lawsuit also alleges that “Student X walked into the…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.”

So, while a troubled boy is allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms with only girls and designated for girls, actual girls are denied the right to use restrooms and locker rooms with only girls and designated for girls despite complaints from both the girls and their parents.

The lawsuit names as defendants “Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Independent School District Number 706 (the Virginia School District) and Secretary of Education John King, Jr.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Boris Vatel writing for Salvo Magazine makes clear some inconvenient truths about the “transgender” phenomenon of which school administrators seem ignorant:

The NYC Commission on Human Rights maintains that gender identity is “one’s internal deeply held sense of one’s gender, which may be the same or different from one’s sex assigned at birth.” This statement intentionally uses language to distort reality. Except in cases of rare medical conditions resulting in ambiguous genitalia, no one’s sex is “assigned” at birth any more than the fact of belonging to the human species is assigned at birth.

More significantly, this statement erroneously implies that a person’s beliefs about himself carry more legitimacy than the physical facts that contradict such beliefs. Using the Commission’s reasoning, can we declare an alternate “age identity” to be legitimately different from one’s true age? What about “race identity” or even “species identity”? If one accepts as legitimate the logic by which men may identify themselves as women and insist on being considered as such by others, there is no reason to reject as invalid any number of other idiosyncratic identities that have no basis in reality.

…To suggest that there is no such thing as objective reality, or that reality is less important than what one wishes it were, renders the entire concept of psychiatric disorder invalid. In fact, the only way to accept the transgender phenomenon as psychiatrically normal is to say that, as a measure of reality, physical evidence is subordinate to what a person believes about or wishes for himself. And on that logic, we have no basis for calling anyone delusional….

Reading through the APA’s position on the transgender phenomenon, one gets the impression that the only suffering and disability experienced by “gender nonconforming” individuals stem from prejudice and discrimination on the part of those who disapprove of them. In reality—that is, any reality apart from the current attempt to reframe this phenomenon as a civil rights issue—these individuals do experience a great deal of disability associated with being unable to function adequately in society, as do other patients whose delusions influence their appearance and behavior.

Although the public’s reaction to the appearance and behaviors of people who consider themselves transgender may, indeed, be negative, to say that the disability of transgender individuals consists of being the recipients of a negative public reaction means confusing the cause with the effect. The fact is that the disability originates in the abnormal mental experience of “transgender” individuals and not in having been born in the “wrong” body or of living in the “wrong” society. However, according to the inverted logic of those who support the LGBT agenda, when an external reality contradicts the internal experience, the solution lies in altering reality in such a way that it conforms to the internal experience. Hence, the advocated approach to addressing an idiosyncratic internal experience is to give the person a new external reality by means of a surgically altered body and a re-educated society.

Identifying the problem as ultimately external naturally leads to the kind of solutions proposed by the New York Commission on Human Rights: fines and sanctions against individuals and institutions that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of being transgender. Ironically, the fact that the Commission would force others to conform to the beliefs of transgender individuals speaks to just how much functional impairment the latter experience in their everyday lives as a result of their beliefs.

The response of organized medicine, and psychiatry in particular, to the transgender phenomenon has been intellectually dishonest and dangerous to the mental and physical health of affected individuals. The acceptance of transgender beliefs as psychiatrically normal has in many cases led to harmful medical interventions in which individuals undergo so-called “sex-reassignment” surgery. These operations cannot “reassign” sex; they can only disfigure normal anatomy.

And now schools are facilitating an intellectually dishonest and dangerous response to a psychiatric disorder—a response that harms both those students who suffer from gender dysphoria and all others.

Here’s an idea: How about parents of students in this district and all other Virginia, Minnesota community members organize a sit-in to protest this science-denying nonsense and moral outrage. They should sit in the superintendent’s office until the administration restores school policies and practices that prohibit students from accessing opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, thereby fulfilling their obligation to protect the modesty and  privacy of girls and boys.

Oh, and maybe someone should send this story to School District U-46 CEO Tony Sanders.

“Laurie’s Chinwags”

Have you had a chance to checkout the latest special feature we are calling “Laurie’s Chinwags?” For the past few weeks, we’ve been adding audio recordings (aka podcasts) to articles written by Laurie. We hope this new feature will serve the needs and desires of IFI subscribers. We would appreciate any constructive feedback.

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Obamas-Radical-Revolution.mp3

The most radical cultural revolution in modern history is taking place, fomented and facilitated by Barack Obama’s egregious abuse of power. He is incrementally obliterating any public recognition of and respect for sexual differentiation. In Obama’s brave new world, immutable biological sex will be rendered meaningless.

Last week, reports surfaced that both the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the General Administrative Services (GSA) have issued “guidelines” or regulations essentially mandating that those government organizations and institutions that fall under the purview of these agencies must treat humans as if their intrinsic, objective, immutable biological sex has no meaning, not even in the most private and intimate contexts.

Department of Housing and Urban Development

In 2012, HUD published its “Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity final rule,” which stated that “Inquiries as to sex are permitted…when determining eligibility for a temporary, emergency shelter that is limited to one sex because it has shared sleeping areas and/or bathrooms.”

But no more.

A new document was published in February 2015 which reverses that position:

Best practices suggest that where the provider is uncertain of the client’s sex or gender identity, the provider simply informs the client or potential client that the agency provides shelter based on the gender with which the individual identifies. There generally is no legitimate reason in this context for the provider to request documentation of a person’s sex in order to determine appropriate placement, nor should the provider have any basis to deny access to a single-sex emergency shelter or facility solely because the provider possesses identity documents indicating a sex different than the gender with which the client or potential client identifies. The provider may not ask questions or otherwise seek information or documentation concerning the person’s anatomy or medical history. Nor may the provider consider the client or potential client ineligible for an emergency shelter or other facility because his or her appearance or behavior does not conform to gender stereotypes. [emphasis added]

This policy change means that any shelter that receives government funding may no longer take into account the sex of persons when assigning them to single-sex accommodations. In order to receive government funds, shelters must house men and women in accordance with the sex they wish they were or claim to be rather than the sex they actually are.

Shelters—like the 200 shelters run by Catholic Charities—will be prohibited from asking anyone seeking emergency shelter in single-sex accommodations about their sex. All that’s required for men to access women’s shelters where abused and traumatized women are often housed is the claim by men that they “identify”—whatever that means—as women.

According to the Washington political newspaper The Hill, this new “guidance” will be finalized in September.

General Administration Services

Just days after the HUD news came out, news broke that the GSA will be requiring all restrooms in the 9,000 buildings and offices it oversees, including “federal courthouses…the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs,” to be co-ed. This new regulation will apply to both federal employees who work in those government buildings as well as all visitors. According to GSA officials, this regulation “is based on a review of recent rulings and directives from the Departments of Education and Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”

And so, the ideological collusion comes to light.

The Departments of Justice and Education

Obama’s GSA is basing its decision on Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and on Obama’s Department of Education (ED), both of which divined and declared that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 respectively didn’t actually mean sex but instead meant sex and “gender identity.”

For those who may have forgotten, it was Obama’s radical attorney general Loretta Lynch who proclaimed that separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites. (I assume, therefore, that Lynch refuses to use women’s restrooms as an act of civil disobedience against unjust discriminatory practices. Come to think of it, what a paltry act of defiance using the men’s restroom would constitute in the face of such a grave social evil. Lynch should be showering with men in the Capitol Hill health club to demonstrate her commitment to “inclusivity, diversity, compassion and open-mindedness” and her solidarity with oppressed men who wish they were women.)

The ED is similarly abusing its power by requiring all minor children and college students in government schools to share restrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms, and hotel rooms for school-sponsored overnight trips with persons of the opposite sex.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) also plays a role in this toxic ideological potage. Lesbian Chai Feldblum, Obama’s recess appointment to the EEOC, was instrumental in redefining the word “sex” for the purposes of advancing sexual deviance in the EEOC case Macy v. Holder. In 2010, “Mia” Macy, a male police detective who pretends to be a woman, applied for a job with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He was turned down and filed a complaint with the EEOC which found in his favor:

The EEOC stated that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination prohibits discrimination on the basis of both biological sex and gender and that ‘gender’ encompasses not only a person’s biological sex but also the cultural and social aspects associated with masculinity and femininity. Thus, discrimination against a person because that person is transgender is discrimination based on sex. [emphasis added]

More recently, in a landmark case, the “EEOC as an agency of the federal government, sued a private business on behalf” of a man who pretends to be a woman. Fortunately, in a rare instance of judicial sanity, a judge ruled against “Aimee” Stephens who sued the private funeral home that fired him. The judge ruled that “Enforcement of Title VII ‘would impose a substantial burden on [the funeral home’s] ability to conduct business in accordance with its sincerely-held religious beliefs.’”

So, Obama has used the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the General Services Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to advance his radical, anti-science social and political revolution. The expansion of the federal government into the behemoth it has become has made this revolution possible. This expansive, intrusive, coercive federal monster now demands that all Americans treat biological sex as if it has no meaning. Bureaucrats are forcing all Americans—including children—to treat gender-dysphoric, sex-rejecting persons as if they are, in reality, the sex they wish they were as opposed to the sex they actually are.

What next? Force us to pretend the world is flat?

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative, urging him or her to rein in the un-elected, leftist federal bureaucrats who are putting our family members in uncomfortable and dangerous situations.

Demand that they take action to stop to the federal takeover of shelters, restrooms, and locker rooms.

You can also place a phone call to your federal lawmaker via the United States Capitol switchboard by calling (202) 224-3121.

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachmann!  She distinguished herself by not only forming and chairing the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 in the U.S. House but also through her courageous and outspoken pro-life leadership as attested to by her rating of zero from NARAL.

Please register today before the early bird special expires.

At the DNC Convention, Michelle Obama made this presumptuous statement:

[T]his election and every election is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.

Her husband’s non-legal attempt to do just that—to exploit his power to shape the lives of other people’s children—is no more evident than in his command to every government school to allow boys in girls’ locker rooms and restrooms and vice versa. His order, delivered via the Department of Education’s Office for (un)Civil Rights, commands schools to allow students who reject their sex to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms and to do so based on nothing more than their claim that they feel like the opposite sex—or both sexes.

In order to attempt to undergird this diktat with a patina of legal authority, the Office for (un)Civil Rights falsely claims that when Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination based on “sex,” the word “sex” includes “gender identity.” If this redefinition of the word “sex” by unelected government bureaucrats prevails, schools will be prohibited from discriminating based on either sex or “gender identity” (i.e., subjective feelings about one’s objective, immutable sex) in even school facilities in which intimate, personal activities take place.

So, what will this mean? It means that eventually all restrooms, locker rooms, and showers will be co-ed. There will remain no way for schools to prevent non-“trans” students (i.e., normal students) from using opposite-sex locker rooms or showers. Schools will not be able to prohibit boys who accept their sex (i.e., normal boys) from using girls’ locker rooms based on the fact that they are objectively male because schools will have already have allowed other objectively male persons in girls’ locker rooms. And schools will not be able to prohibit normal boys (aka “cisgender” boys) from using girls’ locker rooms, showers, or restrooms because they are not “trans,” because that would constitute discrimination based on “gender identity.” The end game is the obliteration of all public recognition and accommodation of sex differences even in private areas.

If Obama’s pernicious goal is realized, people of faith will no longer be able to justify keeping their children in public schools. Parents cannot ethically place their children under the tutelage of teachers, administrators, and school board members so foolish that they don’t understand the meaning of biological sex and who will not protect the physical privacy of children and teens.

In the service of preventing this abuse of power and the destruction of respect for sex differences in our taxpayer-funded schools, IFI has sent this letter of warning, written by attorney Jason Craddock, to the Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Dr. Tony Smith and Board Chairman Rev. James Meeks.

(Click to enlarge)

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send  Superintendent Smith and Board Chairman Meeks an email or fax asking them to please prohibit school administrators from implementing a policy that would permit gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and/or locker rooms.

Let these school officials know that under no circumstance will your child be permitted to share a restroom or locker room with students of the opposite sex. Let them know that as a taxpayer, you are concerned about the modesty, privacy, and safety of students and about the liability of school districts for failing to protect students.

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Written by Carl R. Trueman

Last week, Chad Vegas, a good friend of mine and the Reformed Baptist pastor in Bakersfield, California emailed me as follows:

As you know, CA has mandated this [school transgender policy] for the whole state. I have served on the largest high school board in CA, and the nation, for 12 years. I basically lead that board. Our board voted to adopt the new law into policy. I voted against it. I was breaking the law for doing so. I could be personally sued and our attorney tells me the board insurance won’t cover me because I am breaking the law and I am a bigot. Anyway, I announced I would not seek reelection. The community came unhinged when I announced that. I remain the most popularly elected official in the history of our school board. Thousands of parents filled our board room in protest of the law. Thousands are pleading with me to reconsider and keep fighting. My elders are still considering what to have me do…. [T]he board and administration, and even some leaders in the liberal teacher’s union, are asking me to reconsider.

On Thursday, he announced that he would not seek re-election in a letter to his congregation.

There you have it: A popular, longstanding, and effective member of a school board has had to stand down—not because he does not enjoy the confidence of the community, but simply because he does not accept the latest demands that every knee must bow to whatever the political taste of the moment has decided is non-negotiable.

It reminded me of my review of John Inazu’s new book on confident pluralism and his response. Essentially, I argued that confident pluralism depended upon a balance of cultural and political power. As that balance no longer existed, pluralism was effectively dead. John responded that I was too pessimistic and that my own tone in my review was not entirely conducive to promoting pluralism.

Well, the fate of Chad Vegas in Bakersfield is a great example of precisely my point. He is a popular member of the schoolboard, perhaps the most popular. Even his liberal opponents acknowledge that and want him to stay. But he cannot. He has already broken the law by voting his conscience. He could be sued for that. And how many of those who want him to stay would be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder during a long, exhausting and punitively expensive legal action?

This cultural moment has been taking shape for some time. A few years ago my oldest son was running track for an Ivy League school. One of the team came out as a lesbian and it was decided that all athletes should wear a rainbow armband in support. My son did not want to comply but also did not wish to cause unnecessary offense to his friends and so he called me and asked what argument he should make against the idea. I told him to say that, as one of America’s greatest virtues was its freedom, he should tell his teammates that he absolutely respected their right to wear the armband in solidarity with their friend. They were free to do so and he rejoiced to live in a nation where they could do so. But by the same token, they should respect his right not to wear the armband in accordance with his personal religious convictions. That’s a good argument, I said, and I told him he should make it modestly and politely and then simply not wear the band without drawing any great attention to his act. But I also advised him that it would not be greeted with approval because the issue was not really about the freedom to be tolerant and diverse, whatever the rhetoric. It was about the intolerant political demand that all should be the same. Sure enough, he was decried as a bigot and homophobe.

Thus it is in modern America. To repeat myself: Confident pluralism assumes either a balance of power or a basic common decency between the various sides in any of the cultural debates. The balance and the decency no longer exist. Nor does it matter that there might be a democratic majority supporting the dissenter in whatever public-square conflict occurs. Power is not a function of numbers any more, if it ever was. It is a function of organization and of having one’s hands on the levers of cultural and legal power. Expect no quarter in the conflicts that are already upon us, however many of your neighbors may initially express sympathy with you.

The long Gramscian march of the activist bien pensants through the institutions is reaching its conclusion. It really is. And it is time to face that fact and abandon the myth that the world is run by people who respect difference and diversity, and that all we need to do is behave decently in order to win their respect and earn their favor. They do not think that way. They will never think that way. And they will crush those who do. By any means necessary.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

This article was originally posted at FirstThings.com

Written by John Hayward

Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts.

Totalitarianism is about the politicization of everything, and once people’s careers can be destroyed by the New Bathroom Order if they publicly object to the once-bizarre idea of men in the ladies’ room–we’re there. Ask the now-unemployed Curt Schilling.

Totalitarianism is about using force to gain political goals. You can’t get more coercive than forcing the vast majority of people to endorse the utterly bizarre just to accommodate the allegedly hurt feelings of an almost undetectably small percentage of the population. So for the sake of each transgendered person’s hurt feelings, two thousand ordinary folk must be forced to ignore what their eyes and hearts tell them … and be publicly slandered as quasi-racist bigots if they murmur any objection.

Moreover, Americans have already solved the problem: They just politely ignore the fact that public bathrooms are quietly used by transsexuals–both those who look like the other sex and those who really don’t look like the other sex. That decent-minded, live-and-let-live compromise means Americans don’t have to pretend that men are women, and they can call the police if they feel threatened, for example, when a transsexual wants to use a changing room in a school.

But the progressives’ hostility to Americans’ civic compromises was always an element of the gay marriage crusade, as well. It was clear that the amount of coercive force unleashed upon society to make gay marriage work was far, far greater than the coercion necessary to allow civil unions to quietly operate alongside normal marriage. Sure enough, in the blink of an eye, we went from soft-focus “Love Wins” to the nation’s judges’ gaveling out legal threats: “Bake that cake, or lose your entire business.”

As my old colleague Erick Erickson put it, “You Will Be Made to Care” amid an ever-increasing level of coercion, strife, and bitterness. You will now be made to care about men who claim they “identify” as women, while pushing their way past you and into public restrooms that were once the preserve of wives, mothers, girlfriends, and daughters.

It’s going to take a great deal of money, manpower, and regulation to get the New Bathroom Order up and running.

Remodeling public restroom facilities to create more individual, lockable, unisex rooms is one way to reduce the new humiliation, but it would be very expensive.

We’ll probably need some kind of Ministry of the Crapper, where bureaucrats and judges can separate perverts and goofballs and award official-transgender permits to “authentic” transgendered and gender-confused individuals. A great deal of taxpayer money will be spent, and many new rules will be written by many well-paid functionaries. So what’s not to like, for those of a totalitarian bent?

Better still–for the totalitarians–the level of animosity in society will keep growing, as well. A populace stressed out by paranoia and angry accusations of bigotry will be less likely to cooperate, compete, and live in harmony. Instead of local civic cooperation, they’ll resort to government and police when they have to deal with the next dispute that once could be resolved quietly by a healthy civic society. The politicization of everything naturally leads to the enforcement of everything. Debates become bitter because the stakes are higher, and we cannot simply agree to disagree.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple made this point in a 2005 interview when he described political correctness as “communism writ small.”

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better,” Dalrymple said, adding:

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Eleven years ahead of the game, Dalrymple provided the perfect description of the ridiculous Bathroom Wars, in which the majority is commanded to open wide and swallow the utterly ludicrous idea of letting men-women barge into women’s restrooms, on the vanishingly small chance that a transgendered individual might not be able to find a suitable private stall. It’s so insane that it caught normal people by surprise; they thought it was a joke, until Bruce Springsteen canceled that concert they bought tickets to.

The real game here is to break the will of those ordinary people so they won’t resist even more social engineering.

It’s like the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Jean-Luc Picard is tortured by an alien interrogator, who says he wants only a simple, trivial concession from his prisoner: He wants Picard to look at a bank of four lights, and say that he sees five.  As Dalrymple warned, and Picard understood, that small concession would break his will and open the floodgates to many others.

Those of more advanced years might remember a similar dynamic at play in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, where the seemingly trivial concession involved a captive spy explaining why he quit his job–an answer he refused to give, no matter how many bizarre scenarios were constructed to break his will.

We’re all The Prisoner now, which is basically what McGoohan’s show was warning about, decades ago. Instead of killer beach balls, the enforcement system consists of equally faceless, thoughtless, relentless Twitter social-justice flash mobs.

The progressives’ goal is to humiliate and marginalize the majority—to make normal people feel abnormal, to be alone, to be afraid to dissent from what appears to be an overwhelming, media-magnified, Google-approved, Hollywood-polished, Obama-confirmed, irresistible consensus. As any competent military strategist can tell you, numbers count for less than morale. A demoralized majority can be subjugated by an activist minority when it refuses to fight.

That’s why every new social-engineering crusade is framed as an attack on the moral stature of dissenters.

You’re not insisting on your constitutionally guaranteed religious liberties; you’re “anti-gay.” You’re not saying men don’t belong in the women’s room; you’re “targeting the LGBT community.” You’re not exercising your moral prerogative to refuse to fund abortion; you’re “denying women access to birth control.”

In each case, the dissenter is plainly told up front that he cannot hold his sincere opinion without him also attacking and injuring innocent people. Dissent is dangerous is selfish is criminal. What is the proper name for a political system in which dissent is criminal?

It’s no coincidence the Bathroom Wars are phrased as a struggle over “identity” because identity is the fulcrum of natural order versus totalitarian politics. Certainly, we can all agree that some aspects of our identity are subject to revision–ours to define as we please, although it’s sometimes harder than we bargain for. But some aspects of identity are physical, biological reality.

The totalitarian mindset denies that scientific reality, and insists biology can be overridden by political will–rather like the way totalitarian economic plans assume the laws of supply and demand can be revised by political fiat.

Much of left-wing social engineering is a war between politics and biology, such as the biological truths that children are best raised by their married parents, or that men and women are different. The Left promises to overrule those verdicts of Creation through compulsive force, in a grotesque inversion of the “natural law” ideal, which holds the lightest and most just burden of law flows in accordance with human nature.

Why read academic papers about the Left’s war against identity when you can watch it hilariously demonstrated by the humiliated inmates at a university? Why shouldn’t a white guy of average stature be able to “identify” as a 6’5” Chinese woman?

“It shouldn’t be hard to tell a 5’9” white guy that he’s not a 6’5” Chinese woman, but clearly, it is. Why? What does that say about our culture? And what does that say about our ability to answer questions that actually are difficult?” Joseph Backholm asks at the end of his video.

I can answer that last question: It’s impossible to grapple with difficult questions when your character has been turned to tapioca by liberals, and you lack the courage to reason your way through the most obvious questions.

This has very much been done by design–because it produces a wave of young students and professionals who can be more easily programmed with political assertions that override objective truth.

Backholm’s masquerade as a 6’5” Chinese woman seems like a harmless lark … but if he pushed the issue and really insisted on it, every hour of his life, it would be necessary to use a great deal of compulsive force against the rest of society, to make people ignore the evidence of their own eyes, and to believe his imaginary height, race, and sex.

Most pertinently, you’d have to force normal women, and the men outside who love and protect them, to silently accept his presence in the ladies’ room.

That’s why progressive totalitarians humiliate, destroy, and reassemble people’s character–now known as their identity–to gain their victory.

To make progressives appear sane, all the world must be driven mad; to make them appear noble, all the world must be humiliated by them and their fellow progressives.

Originally published at Breitbart.com.

Target recently announced its new restroom policy, which embraces the absurd notion that in order to be inclusive, sex differences cannot be acknowledged or respected. In light of Target’s sex-integrated, co-ed restroom policy, I called my local Target and had this enlightening conversation with the store manager:

Me: Is it true that all Target restrooms are now co-ed?

Store manager: That’s not exactly how I would describe them.

Me: Well, are your women’s restrooms now open to people who are objectively male, and are your men’s’ restrooms now open to people who are objectively female?

Store manager: The restrooms are available to “transgenders” who identify as the opposite sex.

Me: But humans have both a “gender identity” and a sex, so your restrooms are now co-ed because co-ed means “having or including both men and women.”

Store manager: Our customers can use the restroom of the sex with which they identify.

Me: If a person who appears to be a man enters a women’s restroom, how do you determine whether he’s gender dysphoric or not.

Store manager: If a female customer reports that a man is in the women’s restroom, we would follow-up.

Me: What is your procedure for following up?

Store manager: I don’t know.

Me: So, if I and my three-year-old granddaughter are in the women’s restroom, a man enters, and I report it to store management, you don’t know what would happen next?

Store manager: Well, if this person were not bothering you, he could be in there.

Me: But sharing a restroom with someone of the opposite sex bothers me.

Store manager: Well, Target believes people should be able to use whichever restroom they feel comfortable in.

Me: What if non-gender-dysphoric men—you know, men who share the same sex as “transgenders”— feel more comfortable in women’s restrooms? May they use them? And how would you stop them anyway? You evidently have no procedures to determine if males in women’s restrooms have been diagnosed as gender-dysphoric.

Store manager: (silence)

Me: So, your restrooms are in reality co-ed because people have a sex that cannot change.

Store Manager: Yes, it can.

Me: Are you a science-denier? Even gender-dysphoric persons know they can’t change their sex.

Store Manager: I’m not going to argue with you. 

So, there you have it folks. If women don’t want to use restrooms with men, they will have to use the family restroom, but if gender-dysphoric men don’t want to use restrooms with men, they don’t have to use the family restroom. They get to use the women’s restroom. Gender-dysphoric men are permitted to use restrooms with only women, while women are not permitted to use restrooms with only women.

Many conservatives perplexed by the lies and dragooned by the tactics of body-rejecting activists and their “progressive” allies do nothing when there is much to be done. And they get little help from conservative punditry who seem not to grasp the significance of allowing objectively, immutably male persons in women’s restrooms and vice versa.

Last week the estimable Charles Krauthammer dismissed the so-called “bathroom wars” as “a solution in search of an issue,” suggesting that because those who suffer from gender-dysphoria are few in number, laws requiring that restrooms correspond to sex are silly. Astonishingly, Krauthammer blamed these laws on conservatives:

[D]o we really have an epidemic of transgenders being evil in bathrooms?

Krauthammer…said transgenders using public bathrooms has become a problem “precisely because Republicans in North Carolina decided it was a problem.”

Though it is true that Republicans proposed and passed the North Carolina law that Krauthammer was discussing, they were merely responding to the efforts of gender-dysphoric activists to access opposite-sex restrooms. In other words, Republicans didn’t “decide” that men in women’s’ restrooms was a problem. It is in reality a problem created by gender-dysphoric activists.

As a percentage of the population, there are few gender-dysphoric persons, and until recently, they were using restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their actual sex, so of course we have no “epidemic of transgenders being evil in bathrooms.”

Further, the concern is not centrally about gender-dysphoric persons “doing evil,” but of male predators pretending to be gender-dysphoric in order to easily view, record, or assault women and girls.

The other and at least as serious concern is with what these policies teach about physical embodiment as male or female. Arguing that because few “transgenders” have been “doing evil in bathrooms,” there is no problem, Krauthammer ignores the fact that men in women’s restrooms is the problem, and it is evil.

An uncharacteristically superficial Krauthammer ignores the radical ideas that are embedded in and taught by liberal “bathroom” policies:

• Such policies teach that if people are uncomfortable with their sex, the problem is with their sex—not their feelings.

• Such policies teach the arguable belief that subjective feelings about one’s sex are more important, indeed more real, than objective physical embodiment as male or female.

• Such policies teach that while gender-dysphoric men should be permitted to use restrooms with only women, objectively female persons should not be permitted to use restrooms with only women.

• Such policies teach that in order to be compassionate, one must treat gender-dysphoric persons as if they are in reality the sex they wish they were.

• Such policies teach that feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy derive not from physical embodiment as male or female but from desires about one’s sex.

• Such policies teach that stalls and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate women from gender-dysphoric men but not sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from normal men.

If we define “evil” as reductively as Krauthammer seems to when he says there is no “epidemic of transgenders doing evil in restrooms,” he’s right. If evil is understood as direct physical harm to another, there is no epidemic. But for many, evil is defined as “morally wrong,” and “harmful” and includes doing violence (i.e., “injury, as from distortion of meaning or fact”) to the idea that objective, immutable biological sex carries profound meaning and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire of privacy that men and women naturally experience. This epidemic of philosophical violence is infecting not just corporate policies but school policies and thereby the minds and hearts of children far too young to comprehend the evil being done.

Take ACTION:  So, here are three things that conservatives must do:

1.) Those with children in public schools must tell their administrators that under no circumstance are their children permitted to share restrooms or locker rooms with children of the opposite sex. If gender dysphoric children have the right to refuse to use locker rooms and restrooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share, then other children have the right to refuse to use locker rooms and restrooms with those whose sex they don’t share.

2.)  DO NOT use Leftist language. Language matters:

Do not call them “gender neutral” restrooms. Call them sex-integrated or co-ed restrooms to keep attention on the objective reality the Left seeks to deny.

Do not use the term “transgender.” Use gender dysphoria or gender-dysphoric persons.

Do not use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric persons. Using opposite-sex pronouns does not constitute an act of love. It constitutes participation in and facilitation of a destructive fiction.

3.) As much as possible, avoid using Target. It is not possible to boycott every business that violates true principles, but policies as egregiously offensive as Target’s sex-integrated restroom policy demand a response. And while you’re boycotting Target, call the store manager of your local Target to ask about their co-ed restrooms. Ask management the hard questions, and don’t use liberal language. Use precise, clear, reality-based language. And consider signing on to the AFA Boycott Target pledge.

In this brave new world remade in the image of the Godless, confused, solipsistic, and sexually anarchical, objective, immutable biological sex is meaningless. Please stand for truth and reality publicly, courageously, perseveringly, and unapologetically—and not just when it’s cost-free.

She was only 17 years-old when she died. Her father cut out her tongue and burned her alive.

What was her crime, and why did this man kill his own daughter in the most horrific imaginable way?

He was a Saudi Arabian official who worked with the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – the religious police – and when his daughter became a Christian, he butchered and murdered her.

What does this have to do with Starbucks and Apple?

Both these companies blast Americans who stand for religious liberties and conservative moral values, even threatening states that will protect those liberties and values, claiming this discriminates against gays and lesbians.

Yet they have stores all over Saudi Arabia, a country where gays can be executed and where Muslims can kill their own family members if they convert to Christianity, as happened with this 17-year-old in 2008.

What sickening hypocrisy.

Last year, when Indiana passed a religious freedoms bill, ensuring that its citizens would not be forced to violate their consciences and participate in things like gay weddings, Tim Cook, the openly gay CEO of Apple, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, stating, “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country.”

Cook opined that, “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair.”

His words sounded noble: “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue. This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.”

And so Cook, acted “courageously,” threatening Indiana with a loss of business if the state did not reverse itself, and in a matter of days, the governor and legislature caved in to the pressure, as Apple, along with other major players, succeeded in bullying the people of Indiana.

But when it comes to countries like Saudi Arabia, where adulterers are beheaded on Friday afternoons in city squares, where thieves have their hands cut off, where those who speak against the government can be lashed 1,000 times, where someone posting openly gay messages on social media can be imprisoned, and where the beheaded victims are hung on crosses and displayed publicly for days, Apple is silent, content to make its money and not rock the Muslim boat.

What “courage.”

Or, more accurately, what hypocrisy.

Starbucks has also been an outspoken advocate of “gay rights,” with CEO Howard Schultz telling those “who support traditional marriage over gay marriage that their patronage is not needed at the coffee chain.”

Earlier this month, Starbucks joined more than 100 companies (including Apple) in urging North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory to repeal the bathroom safety bill, which allegedly discriminates against LGBT rights.

How bold and courageous of Starbucks.

But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, not only does Starbucks operate all over this religiously-oppressive country, but the coffee giant completely capitulated to strict Islamic standards, removing the mermaid from its corporate logo.

Yes, you read that right.

Starbucks changed its logo so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities, since the mermaid image apparently displayed too much flesh.

But when it comes to offending Christians, Starbucks could care less, introducing “Holiday” cups last December in place of “Christmas” cups and trashing Christian sensitivities when they are in conflict with gay sensitivities.

Now, I don’t doubt that Cook and Schultz feel strongly about their views and actually believe that these important religious liberties bills are a threat to LGBT rights.

But their selective outrage is sickening and their moral hypocrisy glaring.

And so, when they pull their businesses from countries like China, with all its human rights violations, and Saudi Arabia, with its atrocities carried out in the name of Islam, we can take their indignation seriously.

Until then, the louder they protest here in America, the louder they shout their hypocrisy.

This article was originally posted at TownHall.com

Lake Forest, Illinois resident Dianne Casuto in a letter in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday criticized a previous commentary in which Elizabeth Edens expressed concern over the safety to women posed by female-impersonators being allowed in women’s restrooms. Cassuto wrote, “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a transsexual or transgender individual is present there as well.”

Let’s clean up the euphemistic language, eliminating the Newspeak and rewriting her sentence more clearly: “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a man is present there as well.”

If Casuto is unable to conceive of why women might be concerned for their safety when forced to share restrooms with men, she suffers from a serious imagination deficit.

Why she would place quotation marks around “unsafe” is baffling. “Progressives” feel “unsafe” if they see presidential candidates’ names written in disappearing chalk. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of voluntarily attending a talk by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of a debate on abortion. They feel “unsafe” if Chick-fil-A is on their college campus. So, why are safety concerns about the presence of men in women’s restrooms “inconceivable”?

Leftists, recognizing the importance of language in cultural battles, insist that everyone use their dogma-drenched diction. Those “transgender individuals” about whom Casuto writes who are seeking to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms are actually men.

George Orwell warned about the abuse of language by cultural dictators, a warning that should teach us to resist social pressure to surrender to their imperious commands—while we can:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible….Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

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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.

Massachusetts parents are in an uproar over new state education policies that allow “transgender” students to use bathrooms of the opposite sex. 

The state’s Commissioner of Education, Mitchell Chester, issued the new guidelines to all schools serving students from kindergarten to 12th grade. 

The policy states that boys who declare they are girls must be allowed to use the women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities.  And vice versa. 

“The responsibility for determining a student’s gender identity rests with the student,” the policy reads.  “A school should accept a student’s assertion of his or her gender identity.” 

The policy further directs school officials to address students according to their chosen identity, and to discipline fellow students who fail to affirm a fellow student’s “gender identity choice.” 

The guidelines go so far as to prohibit school officials from discussing a student’s gender identity choice with their parents without the permission of the student. 

The new bathroom rules are the result of legislation passed in Massachusetts prohibiting discrimination based on “gender identity.” 

Kris Mineau, President of the Massachusetts Family Institute, sharply criticized the new directive as a violation of student’s privacy.  “This policy places girls at risk of privacy invasions and sexual abuse as early as kindergarten.”   

In related news, a Colorado couple has filed a complaint against their local school district because school officials won’t allow their six year-old son to use the girls’ bathroom. 

Jeremy and Kathryn Manis have filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division against Eagleside Elementary School in Fountain, Colorado. 

They claim that their son, Coy, is a victim of “gender identity” discrimination in violation of Colorado’s newly revised anti-discrimination statutes. 

Even though Coy is allowed to wear girls clothing to school and is referred to in feminine terms, his parents say that is not enough.  They insist that failure to allow Coy to use the girls’ bathroom “singles out and stigmatizes” their child.