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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Houston, We Have a Gender-Blind Public-Restroom Problem Full disclosure: I am neither a Christian nor a lesbian. Still, I doubt that Sam Houston would have given a man who claimed to be a woman the key to his outhouse. Annise Parker, the openly lesbian mayor of the nation’s fourth-largest city, is currently locking horns with Christian pastors who oppose an “equal rights” bill that allows Houstonians to file discrimination complaints if they were barred entrance to public restrooms that matched their “gender identity” should it conflict with their biological gender. In other words, if a biological male claims he’s a woman and is forbidden to use the ladies’ bathroom at Starbucks to piss away his Pumpkin Spice Latte, it is a human-rights issue rather than a case of an annoying drama queen with nothing better to do. Back in June, the Houston City Council voted 11-6 to pass “HERO” (Houston Equal Rights Ordinance), otherwise known as the “Bathroom Bill.” The ordinance covers much more than the alleged right to unisex bathrooms, but it was that niggling stipulation that caused Christian fundies to aver that it would allow slimy male sexual predators to infest ladies’ rooms under false pretenses. That doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, does it? Come to think of it, aren’t lesbians always trying to protect women from men? Why would these canyon-yodelers want hairy, disgusting males stinking up women’s bathrooms by flashing their wee-wees, anyway? Oh, right—because they’re not really men as long as they don’t believe they are, and to claim anything to the contrary makes one a bigot. I’ll tell you, they make it so hard to keep up with their ever-swelling definition of what constitutes “hate,” it’s hard not to hate them. They keep revising the script more often than my iPhone gets software updates. With the sort of righteous, molten-hot fury stereotypically assigned to Texas Christians, local believers mounted a petition campaign to place HERO as a ballot referendum for November. They needed 17,269 signatures to get it on the ballot; they claim they gathered over 50,000. A city secretary allegedly stopped counting signatures shortly after the bare minimum was reached. But then stepped in sour-pussed City Attorney David Feldman to disqualify enough signatures to declare the petition null and void. Petition supporters then filed a lawsuit to protest Feldman’s rejection of what they claim were valid signatures. Upping the ante considerably, the City of Houston then filed a subpoena request as broad as the Gulf of Mexico. It requested a staggering array of information from five local pastors, none of whom were mentioned in the lawsuit against the city. With a level of intrusiveness that would make NSA officials blush, the subpoena demanded that the beleaguered disciples of Christ turn over All speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuals, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession. Facing a public outcry regarding what seemed like governmental overreach—or even a forced and unlubricated reacharound—Feldman and Parker initially stood firm. “If the 5 pastors used pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game,” the sensible-shoe-wearing mayor tweeted. When the story went national last week, Feldman backed down a half-inch and filed a motion to revise the subpoena’s wording to remove the word “sermons” and downplay the jargon about “gender identity.” As a person who truly believes in “live and let live” up until the point where someone shows no reciprocal respect for my wish to be left alone and unmolested, it matters not to me that Houston Mayor Annise Parker resembles anti-Islamist Dutch politician Geert Wilders in drag. It is none of my business that she once ran a gay/lesbian bookshop with an alleged woman who calls herself Pokey Anderson. I wouldn’t waste one T cell fretting over the fact that in January she finally married her “partner” of nearly 25 years, a decidedly uncomely specimen of the fairer sex named Kathy Hubbard. It is not mine to reason why this high-powered pair of white vagitarians adopted three children, all of them black. But I do sense a pattern here. Both in her private practices and public actions, the stench of fanatical minoritarianism wafts so strongly from Annise Parker’s body, I can smell it all the way here in Georgia, and yea, it is an odor that exudes intolerance. It is no little irony that a prominent, er, “alternatively sexualized” member of the Democratic Party—whose members currently scoff at the idea that voter fraud even exists—sits squatting at the helm of a situation where an alleged two-thirds of petition signatures were dismissed outright as fraudulent. It also sends uncomfortable burning sensations up and down my perineum to witness the specter of a lesbian activist prying into the spoken and written words of religious believers whose sacred scriptures dictate that lesbianism is an abomination before the Lord. In her quest to ensure that a microscopic minority of individuals don’t feel inconvenienced using restrooms that their biological equipment and DNA would suggest they should use, Annise Parker seems not to care one witless whit that she’s making large swaths of her constituency severely uncomfortable at having to share toilets with members of the opposite sex. Why, it’s almost as if Joseph Stalin and Sappho decided to put their differences aside and have a baby. Until convinced otherwise, I will continue to believe that “rights” can only be taken and never given. I will also continue to suspect that the struggle over these illusory and unquantifiable “rights” has nothing to do with freedom and is instead a battle over power. I should be used to it by now, but it continues to depress me when I observe the formerly “oppressed” morphing into despots the moment they get their claws on the whip handle. In the person of Annise Parker, the new boss is once again the same as the old boss—only this time she has a hag-faced wife and three kids that aren’t her own. Poster Comment: Does this mean men can shit in the mayor's private bathroom? Piss all over the seat? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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