The Scrapbook would like to take a break from chronicling transgender idiocy week in and week out. But the Obama administration’s latest threat to North Carolina simply can’t go unmentioned. “The federal government took on North Carolina’s controversial ‘bathroom bill’ Wednesday, giving the governor until Monday to pledge that he will walk away from the law, which Justice Department officials said violates civil rights,” reports the Washington Post. This would be laughable if five different federal agencies weren’t already threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from the state.
The federal government has all sorts of silly regulations, but transgender advocacy is such a novelty that, aside from a few executive orders regarding federal contractors, there’s basically no statute that would grant the Justice Department authority to go after North Carolina for passing a law that stops local governments from passing ordinances forcing businesses to allow biological men into women’s restrooms and vice versa.
According to the Charlotte Observer, the letter the Justice Department sent to North Carolina says the state law “violates Title IX, which bars discrimination in education based on sex, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination.”
The idea that the Civil Rights Act has any bearing on a state law that prevents localities from outlawing single-sex bathrooms is preposterous. Suffice it to say, it’s more than a little odd that the left that likes to scold every backwater school district that regards evolution as merely an instructive theory has lately become adamant in insisting that the sexual distinctions that make evolution possible are a matter of feelings.
Regardless, if the federal government goes all in on the idea of infinitely malleable biological identity, all manner of exciting legal possibilities are going to open up. To cite just one example, if one can self-define as male or female, it can’t be long before people start defining themselves as members of a minority group that is presumed to be disadvantaged, thereby gaining government favor for their minority-owned businesses. What will be the argument against it? Biology? Fat chance. It will come down to the willful and arbitrary exercise of power. Then again, a dedication to “willful and arbitrary exercise of power” might be the only consistent and shared value on the left these days.
Meanwhile, we’re really looking forward to the lectures sure to accompany an upcoming Sports Illustrated issue, on the cover of which “Caitlyn” né Bruce Jenner will appear naked. The nakedness will apparently be strategically covered with a flag and Jenner’s gold medals. But why? We can’t think of a better test of one’s commitment to social justice than being forced to confront the 66-year-old transgender emperor with no clothes.
