To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms.

There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. 

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an ordinance allowing men to use women’s’ restrooms if they believed they were mistakenly inhabiting men’s’ bodies. Wiser heads in the North Carolina legislature prevailed and passed a law “barring cities from adopting anti-discrimination laws that are inconsistent with, or in addition to, the laws in effect at the state level, which already cover race, religion, national origin, color, age, biological sex and handicaps.”

Mark Dayton, Andrew Cuomo, Apple, Pay Pal and Bruce Springsteen Gird for the Restroom Battle

To signal their belief that the transgendered have more rights than women and girls who want to be free of assault, rape, and child molestation when at their most vulnerable, the governors of New York and Minnesota, responded by banning nonessential travel state employee travel to that state. (One wonders why they just didn’t ban all non-essential out of state travel, but that would be too fiscally responsible, I suppose.) PayPal cancelled a planned center in Charlotte. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was one of several high-profile tech CEOs who signed a letter to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory calling on him to repeal the legislation.

“We are disappointed in your decision to sign this discriminatory legislation into law,” the letter reads. “The business community, by and large, has constantly communicated to lawmakers at every level that such laws are bad for our employees and bad for business.” 

There’s a problem, of course, with this corporate virtue signaling as the Washington Times explains:

PayPal’s international headquarters are located in Singapore, where sexual contact between males is punishable by up to two years in prison [snip]The company has a software development center in Chennai, India, where same-sex marriage is prohibited.[snip] “PayPal does business in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal, including 5 countries where the penalty is death, yet they object to the North Carolina Legislature overturning a misguided ordinance about letting men in to the women’s bathroom?” said Mr. Pittenger, a Republican, in a statement. “Perhaps PayPal would like to try and clarify this seemingly very hypocritical position.

Apple’s stance is no less hypocritical. It has stores in Saudi Arabia “where gay people are regularly executed in public and cross-dressing is also a criminal offense. Pro-gay and trans advocacy are illegal, as is every religion except Islam.”

Saying, "To my mind, it's an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress,” Bruce Springsteen (remember him?) cancelled a planned concert in the state. 

Powerline’s Hinderaker concludes, “There was a time when, if you had said that one of our major political parties would someday consider it a vital civil right that men be allowed to use women’s bathrooms, people would have thought you were nuts. They would have been right.”

The Restroom Battle Generals: Lhamon and Jarrett

How did we get to this absurd place? You won’t go wrong if you point your finger at the administration. The U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Division set this ball rolling.

Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.

Education officials said the decision was the first of its kind on the rights of transgender students, which are emerging as a new cultural battleground in public schools across the country. In previous cases, federal officials had been able to reach settlements giving access to transgender students in similar situations. But in this instance, the school district in Palatine, Ill., has not yet come to an agreement, prompting the federal government to threaten sanctions. The district, northwest of Chicago, has indicated a willingness to fight for its policy in court.

The Education Department gave 30 days to the officials of Township High School District 211 to reach a solution or face enforcement, which could include administrative law proceedings or a Justice Department court action. The district could lose some or all of its Title IX funding.

This same department has done battle with various school districts which have tried to accommodate the needs of all students by, for example, allowing transgender students to change behind curtained areas or use specially designated single bathrooms.

I consider this a serious overreach of the department’s mandate, but it is typical of the various Civil Rights Divisions in the Department of Justice and the various departments of the federal government, which through fiats have imposed preposterous rules upon localities. Local governments then have to decide whether to forego funding from the federal government and/or expensive litigation to oppose these dictates. Of course, if you send your daughters to private schools as Obama does, or choose to use bathrooms in Moslem schools, you probably can feel safe in the girl’s restrooms and gym changing areas.

That this nonsense comes directly from the White House is obvious.

The most powerful woman in American politics sent a not-so-subtle warning to the state governments of North Carolina and Mississippi today that she was prepared to send the DOJ attack dogs to do battle against those states’ recent religious freedom laws that would protect businesses from having to abdicate their religious views.

The threat was in regards to those recently passed state religious freedom laws which would primarily serve to protect religious groups and some private businesses from being harassed and/or sued for not participating in events held for gay and transgender people.

Ms. Jarrett, speaking at an event that calls for more gender-neutral toy offerings for children (don’t ask) spoke with media after the event and made clear her intentions to utilize the DOJ to pressure states into backtracking on their most recently enacted religious freedom legislation:

“…I can tell you that we think it’s wrong, we think it’s destructive and we don’t think it reflects the better ideals or who we are as a country.”

At PJ Media, Hans A. Von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams expose the far left orientation of those hired by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who have been working to keep election fraud alive: “when it comes to American elections, the Obama Justice Department has taken the side of criminals over law-abiding citizens. It has taken the side of racial discrimination over equal enforcement of the law. It has used selective enforcement of the law to help Democrats retain power,” the authors conclude, detailing the bizarre actions of this Division.”

There’s no reason whatsoever to suppose the Department of Education’s Civil Rights division is differently staffed. Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights who is imposing the bathroom rules on high schools has overreached in connection with colleges as well, reforming them in her own image.

It was she who’s been forcing colleges to accept the “Dear Colleague Letter” by her predecessor in office which even her boss Deputy Education Assistant Secretary Amy McIntosh conceded is an overreach of Lhamon’s authority, which she seems to consider made her “feelings Czar” over higher education. The letter mandates the standard of proof colleges should use in judging claims of sexual harassment is the low bar of whether the person charged is "more likely than not" to have violated a poorly written harassment policy to suffer disciplinary action. The division also enforces the 2013 DOJ/DOE “Blueprint Letter” which vaguely defines sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” 

Colleges that follow these directives on sexual harassment rather than fight or lose funding are now being sued successfully for violating the rights of those disciplined under these same rules. 

Lhamon’s zeal even entangled her in the now thoroughly debunked University of Virginia rape hoax where, relying on the Rolling Stone reporter’s mischaracterization of a school official’s remarks, she offered up that they were “deliberate and irresponsible,” and opined:

“Nothing annoys me more than a school not taking seriously their review from the federal government about their civil rights obligations.”

Once again the bureaucrats responsible for idiotic policies remain unaccountable for their folly, leaving behind ruined lives and costly litigation for which we will be paying the price.