Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Guilty Conscience Much?

Media Matters has a video of one of those "traditional marriage" quack-experts, by the name of Peter Wolfgang, addressing Connecticut's state congress. His argument is that providing legal protections to trans-gendered individuals will lead to men going into women's bathrooms to sexually assault little girls while the child's (presumably) straight father stands outside.

Mr. Wolfgang literally calls the bill, "The Bathroom Bill".

Stare rep Holder-Winfield responded to the inanity very well (the following transcript is literally copy-pasted from the link above):

REP.HOLDER-WINFIELD: Good afternoon, Mr. Wolfgang.

WOLFGANG:Good afternoon.

REP.HOLDER-WINFIELD: You said if this bill passes, nothing would prevent thesexual predators from taking the actions that you suggest might happen. What prevents themfrom doing that now?

WOLFGANG:Well they’d certainly have more of a reason to do it. And men in general shouldnot be allowed into women’s bathrooms. At issue is the fact that you have anexception for sex but not for gender identity and expression if this billpasses and men can enter women’s bathrooms.

REP.HOLDER-WINFIELD: But my question to you is, whatprevents them from doing it now? Youranswer, while a response, doesn’t actuallyindicate what does that.

WOLFGANG:Well, I mean, you know, there are laws thatprevent crimes, obviously, from taking place in bathrooms in general. But, I mean, why give sexual predators a pretext? Whygive them an excuse to say,Look, I’m transgendered and that’s why I went intothe women’s bathroom.” Obviously it’s you know, there are laws for registeredsex offenders.

REP.HOLDER-WINFIELD: And so those laws would actually exist if the crime wascommitted after entering the bathroom, even if thislaw passed if this bill passed, is that not correct?


Wolfgang and his ilk betray a severe lack of comprehension of the issues at hand when they rattle of the type inanity seen above. I'm honestly proud of Wolfgang for acknowledging that sexual assault is a problem in America; but his single-minded fixation on trans-gendered males, and those who would pose as one, obfuscates and distracts from other possible types of harassment and assault. I'll ignore men and boys as victims, since Wolfgang doesn't seem concerned about them, and point out that by his logic he should be arguing for separate bathrooms for the L and B women of the LGBT communities. IMHO a *more* sensible topic to discuss would be how to offer protections to everyone from everyone else.

The failure of his imagination to think of those possible scenarios makes me wonder; what has Mr. Wolfgang been fantasizing about that makes him so concerned about protecting little girls from straight men?

Or maybe he's just a dumb-ass bigot.

Fun fact: I've always assumed that it was spelled "Conneticut" until I spell-checked this post and discovered "Conne[c]ticut" is the correct version. Also it was only a few weeks ago that I discovered "gover[n]ment" isn't spelled "goverment". Somewhere all of my English and social studies teachers are crying :'(

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