Transgender bathroom bill close to passage

After believing a transgender bathroom bill was dead on the Assembly floor, GOP leaders are fretting the controversial measure is within a vote or two of passage before Tuesday's deadline.

The measure has no chance to become law -- it will either die in the Senate or be vetoed by the governor. But a headline highlighting the Assembly Republicans, who have been a serial embarrassment thanks to a core group of flat-out ignoramuses and religion-fueled obsessives, passing out this discriminatory bill rightly worries the more sane members of the caucus. They are, however, fearful of losing members on on other issues (taxes?) if they are pressed to vote against the bill.

Gov. Brian Sandoval has expressed serious reservations, and many observers have been appalled by the bill, which seeks to treat transgender kids as outcasts. Just this weekend, Karen England, who heads a social conservative group pushing the measure, wrote an op-ed that compared transgenders to handicapped kids.

That point of view has support among a caucus described by one wag thusly: "There are failed child stars with more stable psyches."

And the man pushing the bill to a vote, Judiciary Chairman Ira Hansen, who lost the speakership when a series of homophobic and racist columns were exhumed, had this to say to the Review-Journal:

“I didn’t realize when I was growing up that I was a horrible segregationist because boys went to the boys bathroom and girls went to the girls bathroom. We want to maintain that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the other issues opponents were bringing up.”

That is an exemplar of sophistry and about as disingenuous as it gets.

Look upon this caucus and despair....

 

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