Before we get too far along, let me explain the headline. A 14th-century French philosopher, Jean Buridan, is attributed with the phrase, or so the saying goes, by creating the following dilemma. He posed, perhaps erroneously so, that a fictitious, but hungry donkey, if placed between two equally distant stacks of hay, would starve to death because it could not make up its mind which to choose. The choice wasn’t a hard one, but the donkey simply could not decide.
Given that this scribble is about politicians, the metaphor is apt. It seems at times that we voters cannot get politicians to do the right thing most of the time. Our elected bodies, whether federal or state, are either do-nothing crews or please-don’t-do-that gangs. We cannot seem to win without losing. And the ass in this case seems especially felicitous. As Mark Twain once wrote: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” To underscore this matter, let me proffer the following.
While most readers are going about the doldrums of the afterclap of the holidays, a group of mostly women is doing something extraordinary. On Wednesday of this week, about 50 women will board a bus in Fort Mill and take the drive down I-77 to the state capital. On the bus with them will be a few elected officials lucky enough to call them personal friends. It’s not only extraordinary that these women will get up at the near-crack of dawn and make the hour-plus long trip, but it is even more extraordinary why they are doing it. On the way there and back, they have even asked—yes asked—these elected officials to speak, and we all know how happy any elected official is to do just that. It’s not enough that they are doing this excellent work for us, but they are also learning about these elected officials on the way.
So, why are they going down, bus-wise, to Columbia? Because, mirable dictu, we cannot get our legislators to speak up for women’s privacy without some ample goading to pass HB 4756, the Women’s Privacy bill.
Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but we live in a time where, if a man identifies as a woman, he is entitled to enter any private place a woman might enter on her own: a shower, a locker room once identified for them alone.
Now, much of this is because that other party cannot define what a woman is, and while I am happy to assign them all the blame for profound stupidity (including why this bill hasn’t passed before now), we cannot overlook the part that all of us allowed: virtually every restroom in America is now unisex.
I know you’re thinking this had nothing to do with it, but pause a minute. We made a very subtle shift in thinking about what men’s rooms are and what women’s rooms are. We decided, a decade or so ago, that it really didn’t matter, and now everyone can use the same restroom. Yes, in most places, it’s only one at a time—and I for one wish to apologize to every woman who must attend their needs in a bathroom that a man has miss-used it, if you get my drift—but the loss of distinction is there, and every child growing up today has this daily reminder that men and women are distinctions without differences. But I digress.
The mere velleity of saying you “identify” gets you, not only entrance where you have no business, but also federal protection. I have identified for years as a multimillionaire, but neither my finances, my financial advisor, nor the government has abided by my identification. And yet I could today say that I identify as a woman and enter a woman’s private space.
These courageous women are making the trek to Columbia to get our legislature—mostly men, mind you–to grow a pair, as it were, and stand up for women’s right to privacy. Not just privacy in sports, where a man would almost always win against a woman, but also in places of certain private behaviors that should be for each gender alone. It’s insane to think that we must have this discussion at all. And it beggars belief that we have to beg our state legislature to codify this obvious distinction, but here we are. This isn’t the first year this matter has come before them. But like Buridan’s Ass, our legislators have been trying to make up their minds about two alternatives when there is only one: men and women are not the same because they are two genders, and two genders alone. Male and female created He them, so to speak.
We know scientifically that this is the case, and we also know without any shadow of a doubt that those who are supposedly “identifying” against their biology are either imbecilic or posturing.
So, this Wednesday, while you are sipping your second cup of coffee, take a moment to say a prayer of thanks for these women who are making it painfully difficult for legislators to ignore them,or this issue. They are making this trip to make certain our jack–, er, legislators know exactly which bale of hay to choose, as if it were not obvious from the beginning, literally.
