Transgender students are not a punch line, Steve King
By D’ANNE WITKOWSKI
On May 14, right-wing Christian radio show hosts Shane Vander Hart and Brian Myers of “Caffeinated Thoughts” interviewed Congressman Steve King, R-Iowa, about President Obama’s directive that public schools must let transgender students use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity.
Not everyone is happy about the directive and one of those unhappies is King. Never a friend to LGBT people, he has some very inspired thoughts about providing trans students basic decency.
“(Obama has) issued a federal decree that they’re going to come after any school that doesn’t allow boys in the girls’ room, girls in the boys’ room, anybody to go into any room that they happen to feel at the moment,” laments King, “and genders can switch on the way to the bathroom.”
In King’s mind, not only is the girls’ room fair game for boys now, but, like Mike Huckabee before him, King has a weird idea about what presumably cisgender boys with senioritis are going to do now.
“All over America, they’ve got to be lined up right now, the pranksters, going, ‘I’m going to go into the girls’ room,’” King says.
Lest his hosts think that he’s just kidding, King adds, “It’s the unhumorous humorous reality of how perverse our society has gotten under Barack Obama.”
The cure for what ails the U.S.? Prayer in schools, which, according to King, the Supreme Court had no business eliminating back in 1963.
I suspect, however, that if anyone has kept prayer in school alive, it has been transgender students who hopefully will no longer have to spend valuable class time praying that they can manage to either pee in peace or hold it until they make it home.