Business As Usual

Once again the conservatives are crying over bathrooms, this time in Houston.

Bathroom Battles: Scaremongering Abounds about Transgender Public Restroom Usage
Huston Press
By Jef Rouner
Aug. 27 2014

In March 2013, Alexis Hollada, better known by her stage name, Doomstress Alexis, is on her way back from Austin with her drummer, Raymond Matthews, in tow. The pair have just rocked a gig during SXSW with their doom metal act, Project Armageddon, and now just want to get back to Houston after picking up a bite to eat at a diner on U.S. 290. There isn't much on the bass player and vocalist's mind aside from food and a chance to use the bathroom before the long drive home, and she's still high on the adrenaline from performing.

She and Matthews seat themselves and order coffee, which arrives a minute later while they look at their menus and wait for the server to take their order. And wait. And wait.

Time crawls along in the diner, which doesn't look particularly busy. Repeated attempts by the pair to make eye contact with or flag down a server are ignored. Even polite calls for help and service elicit either a dead stare or no response at all. Hollada finally realizes what's happening.

Since them Houston passed a non-discrimination ordinance, Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) and three guesses what the conservative and religious leaders objected to… and the first two answers don’t count. Bathrooms! I bet you never would have guest.

Opposition to the bill, which includes a gender identity provision, comes mostly from the conservative and religious right, including former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Earlier drafts contained a paragraph mentioning specifically that businesses would not be allowed to refuse entry to any public restroom that was consistent with a person's gender identity.

Most of the opposition has been based on the notion that the ordinance made all bathrooms gender-neutral and that transsexual and transvestite men would now be able to easily and legally stalk women and female children in the stalls. Opponents call it the Sexual Predator Protection Act.

Wow, where have you heard that before?

And they used the same old lies like the one involving 2012 incident at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington which was a total lie. Who said that if you tell a lie often enough and long enough it becomes true?