Targeting Target: Identifying vs. Being

                             Targeting Target: Identifying vs. Being

                    Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 25, 2016

            The following account is not concocted.  It is an honest, accurate description of an actual event.

            Three weeks ago I visited a Target store near where I live.  My objective wasn’t to make a purchase, but to see if what I had been reading about Target was true.  The information I had been receiving was that Target was leading the way in the Battle for the Bathrooms.  It was only fair to Target that I see for myself and ask a few questions.

            Once inside the store, I looked around for the manager.  Not seeing anyone who was thusly tagged, I decided to approach anyone who looked authoritative.

            Ah!  Standing at the front, facing the endless row of cashiers and exiting customers were three ladies who seemed to be surveying their domain.  One appeared to be in her forties; the other two were definitely twenty-something.

            Approaching the three of them, I asked, “Ladies, is it ok if I use the ladies restroom here in your store?”  The oldest lady, with a half-laugh and a tad of consternation, quickly answered “Nooo!”

            Instantly one of the two younger women, who obviously had more authority, laid her hand on the older woman’s forearm as though to restrain her, and said. “Wait, now!”  Turning to me she said, “Sir, you may use the restroom you identify with.”

            “What do you mean by ‘identify’?” I asked.

            “I mean that if you identify with a particular restroom, you may enter it.”  (In 10^th grade English they call that a redundancy.)

            I want to help make America sensible again.  We can start the journey to sensible only by fighting the forces that have slain common sense, stretched “equality” to the breaking point (not to mention trivializing it), while clothing themselves in something called “tolerance.”  I also wish to awaken parents to what we are letting happen.

            So, I forged on with one more question.  “So if I choose right now to identify as a female, I can go right now into the ladies restroom?”

            “Sir, all I can tell you is you may use the restroom you identify with.”

            Despite all the redundant vagueness, the answer I got was quite clear.  Target stands guilty as charged, or at least that particular store does. (Are dads of small or teenage girls keeping up with this issue?)

            This whole business, of course, is part and parcel of the transgender culture war.  And don’t we just love and admire the REAL men of the NFL and NBA who are defending my “right” to go into the ladies room?  Pro athletes were once the last vestige of masculinity.  Now they have caved, giving in to cultural currents that defy reason.

            But Dr. Paul McHugh, former Chairman of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, hasn’t caved.  Still a voice of reason, the good doctor, who ended sex-reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins, rejects the argument that gender is a “social construct,” unrelated to biology.

            The mainstreaming of homosexuality took a long time.  Not so, that of transgenderism and gender equality.  Last year’s Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, that granted civil-rights protection to homosexual marriage, was more than a foot in the door.  It opened the door wide, through which, no doubt, will march “trouples” and any other marital arrangement people prefer. Through it supporters of non-gender bathrooms  have already marched.

            Unlike most politicians, Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina is standing firm.  It was North Carolina’s House Bill 2 that over-rode local ordinances like the one in Charlotte which allowed use of public facilities by either sex.  Because of HB 2, the NBA is moving its 2017 All-Star game out of Charlotte. 

            The so called men of the NFL, the NBA, and scores of corporations are rejecting  biology, chromosomes, the created order, and the fact that we are male and female.  They are rejecting what gender equality rejects which includes modesty, privacy, dignity, safety, comfort, and vulnerability.      

            Upon learning about the president’s directive regarding school restrooms, Texas governor Greg Abbott earlier this year tweeted, “JFK wanted to send a man to the moon.  President Obama wants to send a man to the women’s restroom.”  What a difference in goals and vision.

            The push for transgenderism and gender equality has led to public policy based on whim and the principle of the squeaky wheel. It also casts doubt in the minds of children and youth about an issue that for millennia has been settled.

            If “gender dysphoria” is a legitimate condition, surely there are other ways to sympathetically address it than by creating laws that defy nature and by government reaching into the schools and toilets of local communities.

            Time to say “Enough!”

Roger Hines

9/21/16