Locker Room Follies

Last year, California’s governor signed into law Assembly Bill 1266, which directs that in our public schools gender is something students choose, rather than something they are born with.  If a student with male genitalia self-identifies as a female, he/she is allowed to choose to use the girls’ bathrooms and showers.  The upshot of this law is to respect the feelings of  those who are conflicted with their own gender identity at the expense of the privacy rights of the majority.

In response to this travesty, Privacy For All Students (PFAS) was formed and circulated a petition to get a referendum on the ballot, to give the people of California the opportunity to voice their opposition to this invasive social engineering.

504,760 signatures were needed to place the referendum on the 2014 ballot.  PFAS garnered 619,346 signatures and submitted them to the State.  PFAS even had to take the Secretary of State to court to force the full count of signatures in two counties.  In its examination of the signatures, the State has only deemed 487,484 to be valid, disqualifying 131,857 signatures — a whopping 20% of all signatures submitted.

From their latest email update, PFAS writes, “The law allows for PFAS to now look at the rejected signatures and to challenge the results.  Election officials are not making this easy for the PFAS representatives and attorneys that are seeking to examine the rejected signatures.

But we will not be bullied. We will fight to have fair standards, consistently applied.  And we will demand that all valid signatures be counted.”

In their update, PFAS talks about some of the reasons that signatures have been thrown out:

If your signature on the petition looks different from your signature on a voter registration card or even a DMV record, then your signature may have been thrown out.

If the printing of your address looks like the printing of any other signer on that page, then your signature may have been thrown out.

If you left out or transposed any numbers in your address, then your signature may have been thrown out.

If you were mistaken about which county you live in, then your signature may have been thrown out.

Some believe that this is fair, that a signature and all accompanying information should be filled in perfectly by the signer.  Nobody should help fill in the address (or if you had help, you should write a note on the petition that says so).  There should be no leniency for age and infirmity or even cultural issues.  If you signed the petition quickly or your signature has changed over the years, that is too bad.

That may sound good.  We all want to be sure that the system is not manipulated and that all of the signatures counted are legitimate.

But it also looks like the goal is to find a reason to reject–not accept–signatures.  And the results (more than one in five thrown out) show it.

We know that election officials are very lenient on who can vote.  Efforts to assure the identity of voters has been fought throughout the country.  But when citizens want to challenge a misguided law, suddenly these same election officials become experts at handwriting and printing and are not so interested in letting everybody be counted.

For now, it remains to be seen if PFAS will successfully challenge the signature count.  The good news is that AB 1266 will not go into effect until the outcome of this challenge is determined.  Gender selection proponents are pulling out all the stops to see that attitudes toward their agenda become sympathetic.  There was even the recent story of the student who identified as a boy, who claimed to be assaulted in the boys’ bathroom by three intolerant students of the same gender.  Turns out he/she made the whole thing up.  But before that confession came out, I heard one radio talk show say the real problem was parents teaching their children that things like transsexuality and homosexuality are sins.

This LGTBQ ideologue insisted it isn’t a liberal versus conservative issue, but equated the teaching of children that certain sexual behaviors are sins with teaching hatred and intolerance.  (Just a not on tolerance: It was invented by Christians, who were committed to treating with respect those with different religious convictions.  But failing to call sin sin is not tolerance.  It is the loss of all moral compass.)  But that’s where our society is now — well, at least a large part of it.  No individual sexual practice or preference or sense of gender identity is seen as wrong.  And those of us in the morally conservative or traditional majority have no right to say what’s right or wrong, because, “It’s all good.”

The LGBTQ agenda is so important to its proponents that they don’t care about the 15 year-old girl, struggling with her normal (there, I said the word) issues of self-confidence about her own body, being forced to share space in close proximity to someone with a male body who wants to be a girl.  AB 1266 cares only for the gender-challenged teen.  Regular kids will be forced to have their privacy violated.

Privacy was established to protect children from embarrassment and prevent unwelcome and inappropriate scenarios from arising.  In school settings, the practice of privacy and modesty were established to prevent teasing, bullying and other social behaviors that can victimize, humiliate or intimidate innocent children.  What kind of insanity is it that is causing us to sit idly by, while traditional wisdom and prudence are so carelessly discarded?  What do you suppose our Creator is thinking about all this?  And what do you suppose he’s going to do about it?  Shouldn’t that make a difference when we think about what we might do?

Additional information on AB 1266 can be found at http://www.privacyforallstudents.com

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Michael Day is a native Californian and a retired mailman, proud of the fact that while most of his friends were protesting the war in Viet Nam, he volunteered for the draft and served in combat with the U.S. Army Infantry. His diverse life experiences range from singing with the San Diego Opera to doing menial labor and being involved in church leadership for twenty five years. His blog, http://retiredday.wordpress.com, is an expression of his deep convictions concerning freedom and Biblical faith.

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