Wednesday, June 08, 2016

I Have To Ask Why?

Why did she accept the job at the ACLU? She must have known that ACLU was involved with trans rights, after all they worked to pass trans legislation in a number of states around the country including Connecticut which they strongly backed since at least 2003 with the Hate Crime legislation.
An ACLU Attorney’s Ugly Transformation Into An Anti-Transgender Pundit
ThinkProgress
By Zack Ford
June 6, 2016

Conservatives are clamoring to highlight the story of Maya Dillard Smith, the Interim Director of the ACLU’s Georgia chapter who quit over her position on transgender issues. Under the guise of having “questions” about trans issues, Smith has fully embraced a new public role as an advocate against transgender equality.

The crux of Smith’s objections to the ACLU’s transgender-inclusive positions is an experience she claims she had with her two youngest daughters in a bathroom back in California before making the move:
I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.
If Smith sincerely just didn’t know enough about transgender people to answer her daughters’ questions, that’s one thing. But she has indicated that she herself was uncomfortable and concerned for her family’s safety, and she has since used the idea of asking such questions to reinforce anti-trans talking points. In fact, she seems to be embracing a new public persona as an anti-trans pundit.
Now come on, here she is a civil rights lawyer and she is worried about how people feel? Would she had said the same thing in the fifties about allowing blacks to share the bathroom with whites? She must have known that these fears are unfounded, after all she was the head of the Georgia’s ACLU.

The article goes on to say in the article that she has created a website to open the discussion on trans rights but they point out that,
If all Smith were doing in her video was asking questions, that might not be a problem. It’s the video’s non-question statements — including deliberate misgendering of transgender girls — that reveal Smith’s biases:
  • There’s some boys who feel like they’re girls on the inside, and there are some boys who are just perverts.
  • Boys [sic] in the girls bathroom? I don’t know about that.
  • I don’t want him [sic] to be uncomfortable in the boys’ bathroom, either. I don’t want them to be uncomfortable anywhere. But what about me too?
  • What makes it scary is that sometimes strangers take advantage of kids.
The girl in the ad can’t even say the “perverts” line without laughing.
[…]
Smith accused the ACLU of being “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights” and catering to a “hierarchy of rights.” The ACLU has not commented, describing Smith’s departure as a personnel matter.
I have to ask the question; why did she join the ACLU? Was there an agenda on her part?

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