Quick And Rare Political Post: Scapegoats and Red Herrings- Thoughts on the NC Law

Sorry to everyone who reads this for going quiet. Been really stretched for time lately. I promise to give more thoughts on my Gala Ball weekend. I've had time to digest it and need to write so I don't lose that. But today, a quick post on politics. 

First thing first, I have never posted on politics on this page, and I promise that these types of posts on my page will be almost zero in the future. We all have our beliefs, often passionately held, and i respect's one's rights to have their beliefs - even if I don't agree with them. 

Second, I know politics turns some people off. They don't want to read stuff like this. I get it. I do hope you come back though. I love hearing thoughts and it boosts my ego to have readers like all of you. Please don't run away - I promise this type of post will be EXCEEDINGLY rare! :-)

Okay. All of that said, this article, from my favorite publication, captured my two major views on the bathroom issue, which fills up my news feed. First, TGs are being made scapegoats by the long-term (and recent) losers in a wider cultural war that has been playing out for more than 50 years now. Second, the bathroom issue is really a red herring in that it provides a simple target (no pun intended) that is easy to horrify people with (even though fears are unfounded), so that they won't focus on the other terrible aspects in this bill that would be less likely to past muster with as much of the electorate if they were the focus of the publicity. Here's a quote and a link, and I'll stop there. 

"Consider North Carolina’s law. Its defenders protest that it has been misunderstood, and they are right: it is much more sweeping than is commonly recognised. It mandates a statewide discrimination policy that omits sexuality as a criterion, squashing a more liberal ordinance passed in Charlotte. (With the Obama administration and some big companies, liberal cities are among the gay and transgender movements’ key allies.) The law also makes it impossible to sue for discrimination in state courts; by the by, it prevents cities instituting their own minimum wages...Yet the aspect its supporters stress is the bit about bathrooms, with all their ickiness and primal sensitivity. The same distracting emphasis was deployed by conservatives in Houston to vote down a new anti-discrimination policy last year. As campaigners often point out, this approach has form: scaremongering about bathroom safety was a tactic in resistance to racial desegregation...Perhaps, then, America’s suddenly fraught bathrooms should be seen as an improbable pivot in its history: the site of a skirmish between a rapidly rising new orthodoxy and its resilient predecessor, which may seem as preposterous in the future as it would have done in the past. In this battle transgender activists are avatars for reform as well as its champions; combatants in America’s culture wars, but also their victims."

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21699117-how-access-public-restrooms-became-central-issue-american-politics-plughole?frsc=dg%7Cc