Get Out of Panic Mode
The governors of four states were recent candidates for President. A primary boast by each of them was the number of new jobs created in his state while he was governor.
Those states are going to have to move down at least one notch in the jobs creation race to make room for North Carolina. That state’s recently enacted House Bill 2 is a formula for explosive employment growth.
Under HB 2, an individual must use gender coded public toilets that are for the sex registered on his or her birth certificate. The coin boxes on pay toilets are being replaced in North Carolina by security guards who can read your birth certificate.
Guards will have to be employed for every public toilet in the state. In some cases, two or three shifts may be required.
That is just the start. What about the man or woman who runs to a public toilet, is about to wet his or her pants, but cannot find a birth certificate? Will there be a private cubicle at the door where the hurting patron can drop his pants or raise her skirt for another guard to verify gender?
If so, contractors will have to be hired to build those cubicles, and additional guards or gender checkers will be required.
Where privacy cubicles are not provided, a full time cleaning person will have to be employed for each public toilet entrance to clean up after those who could not contain themselves while searching for the required birth certificate.
Two new industries might grow out of HB 2. One would be to laminate or miniaturize birth certificates to the size of army “dog tags” so they can be worn around the neck at all times. Or an alternative might be to establish a forgery ring to prepare birth certificates indicating any sex desired. A person could then carry one of each and use any toilet desired.
Finally, what will they do with a Caitlyn Jenner who shows up at a ladies toilet and shows his/her birth certificate indicating “male?”
This, obviously, is a facetious comment on a non issue that some scared folks are taking very seriously. It reminds me of the unreasoned panic among southern whites when they were told public schools were going to be integrated.
Get real. How many school boys will want to go into a girl’s restroom to look at feet under the closed doors of stalls and girls washing their hands? If young boys or girls are interested in the anatomy of the other gender, they can find more than they can handle on any computer with internet access.
What about those dirty old men entering women’s restrooms at the public mall? Same thing as at the schools. They will just see closed, privacy stalls and wash basins.
There are normally more than one patron in each facility in individual closed stalls or washing hands at the lavatories. If only one female is present, and danger approaches, there will be plenty of others available within shouting or screaming distance. Under those circumstances, the possibility of danger is extremely remote.
Then consider the incident at one of the sporting venues in Houston several years ago. That’s when the waiting lines at the ladies’ restrooms were so long that some women began barging into the men’s rooms.
There was something of a brouhaha over this, but something good came of it. Laws and regulations now require that, in new facilities, ladies’ rooms must have twice the number of toilets as urinals in the men’s rooms.
That common sense solution was developed after the panic mode subsided.
So here’s the perspective.
This problem, if it can be called a problem, has existed for a long time. It has been handled on a case-by-case basis by local authorities.
Now legislators and bureaucrats who should be working on real problems have stepped in and said, “Father Knows Best. You must do it this way.” In other words, one shoe fits all when it really does not.
The most disturbing thing about this whole affair is that state and federal authorities are concentrating on this local matter instead of on serious economic, security, and similar government responsibilities.
Let’s back off, cool down, and let local authorities handle this matter in their own way as they have for years.
enough
