16 May 2016 Obama Locker Room Edict Condemned by Black Conservatives
“Attaching this insanity to the legacy of civil rights… trivializes everything the brave men and women experienced and sacrificed in the pursuit of social, economic and legal equality…”
“Civil rights champions were not spat upon, beaten with police batons and sometimes murdered for the right of men to go to the same restroom with little girls…”
“Why is there such a rush to strip away the innocence of American children?”
“As a Christian conservative, Black clergyman, I am deeply offended…”
“The idea that a mentally ill person should assume the mantle of civil rights so hard-fought and won by black Americans is insulting…”
“This is cruel and divisive and will ultimately be overturned…”
“We are expected to accept the notion that the privacy concerns of ‘straight’ students is simply not as valuable as the claimed rights of transgender youths…”
“The physical and emotional abuse blacks endured under segregation, on a good day, are in no way analogous to the adulation and ‘rights’ that those who suffer from gender dysmorphia are experiencing and receiving…”
“Middle- and upper-income Whites in search of artificial oppressed person status can do so without using our history…”
“This is nothing less than legalized blackmail…”
Washington, D.C. – Members of the Project 21 black leadership group have joined the national discussion about the Obama Administration’s threat to withhold federal education funding from schools that assign bathroom and locker rooms by biological sex.
Project 21 members lack enthusiasm for the Administration’s edict.
Many also are offended that federal officials have compared their effort to mix biological genders in locker rooms and restrooms to the multi-decade struggle against Jim Crow, and the multi-century battle against racial discrimination.
Among the members of Project 21 who are publicly speaking out:
From Missouri
“Comparing gender dysphoria to innate characteristics such as race is a bridge too far for scientific-minded individuals, but not for the Organized Left. The idea that a mentally ill person should assume the mantle of civil rights so hard-fought and won by black Americans is insulting,” said Project 21’s Stacy Washington, a former elected school board member, Emmy-nominated TV personality and talk show host on KFTK 97.1 FM in St. Louis.
“But where are the women’s rights advocates? Where are those who trumpeted the War on Women campaign so successfully during the last presidential cycle,” Washington asks. “If you look at the numerous assaults against women and children in the bathrooms, locker rooms and changing facilities in retail outlets across the country, you see a clear pattern: perverts need no invitation to assault women. Making it easier by giving them the cover of law that purports to offer newfound rights to transgendered people isn’t the answer. The edict issued by the Obama Administration is just another reason for parents and legislators to support school choice.”
From California
“As if the nation needed it, we just got another reminder of the wild ride we’ll be on during the final remaining months of the Obama regime,” said Joe Hicks, a political analyst and Project 21 member. “Released from any need to pretend that he’s a ‘moderate,’ Obama ran his leftist social justice flag even higher up the flagpole by threatening every public school district in the nation with punishment if they don’t allow all transgender students to use any bathroom or locker room they want. The nation’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, idiotically compared a North Carolina law to white supremacist Jim Crow laws that legalized race-based segregation. Mirroring the rhetorical tactics of Eric Holder, Obama’s former A.G., Lynch announced that she is suing North Carolina over its commonsense law, which simply says that people have to use a bathroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificates.”
“It is important that all of this liberal and leftist angst and claims of victimization be put in a proper context,” Hicks continued. “Only 0.3 percent of the nation’s population identifies as transgender. The entire LGBT population is estimated to be 3.4 percent. Only a year ago, the stated goal of LGBT activists was the right to marry. Now accomplished, this movement wants more — always more. Now, we are expected to accept the notion that the privacy concerns of ‘straight’ students is simply not as valuable as the claimed rights of transgender youths. At the White House, and within liberal-left activist circles, commonsense is like Kryptonite to Superman.”
From California
“When Barack Obama ran for president back in 2008, he promised to fundamentally change the United States of America. He has done just that,” said Derryck Green, who is completing his doctorate in theology and ministry at Azusa Pacific University near Los Angeles.
“Culturally normalizing and celebrating homosexuality and the redefinition of marriage through an unrelenting social program of dishonesty — at the expense of the traditional understanding and institution of marriage, in addition to the intentional violation and suppression of religious liberty — is part of Obama’s transformational promise,” added Green. “So is his devotion to erasing the distinction between male and female by forcing the country into participating in the celebration of the mental and emotional illness of transgenderism.”
“On its own merits, advancing this new and destructive social morality is problematic. That Barack Obama has done so by attaching this insanity to the legacy of civil rights, specifically that of Jim Crow segregation, trivializes everything the brave men and women experienced and sacrificed in the pursuit of social, economic and legal equality. The physical and emotional abuse blacks endured under segregation, on a good day, are in no way analogous to the adulation and ‘rights’ that those who suffer from gender dysmorphia are experiencing and receiving. For the Obama Administration to say as much insults the intelligence, and brazenly disrespects the tradition of, the black civil rights movement,” Green concluded.
From Louisiana
“As a Black Southern man who grew up fighting what I call ‘Jim Crow-lite’ in the 1970s-1980s, in Savannah, Georgia, home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, I find the ridiculous transgender/civil rights movement comparison insulting and disrespectful,” said Nadra “Cap Black” Enzi, a New Orleans anti-crime activist.
“Once again the Black experience is hijacked by individuals whose contempt and desperation is obvious! Middle- and upper-income Whites in search of artificial oppressed person status can do so without using our history to prop up delusional defenses. The fact that co-conspirators in this farce include a bi-racial President of the United States who self-identifies as Black, and the second Black U.S. Attorney General, speaks volumes on how far some have strayed away from the straight and narrow path pioneered by the Civil Rights Movement and the moral culture which produced it,” Enzi concluded.
From New Jersey
“As a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, who happens to be Black by His design, I am thoroughly outraged that Obama would think he could even suggest, no less implement, such madness as ‘gender identity’ and ‘transgender rights’!” says Project 21’s Reverend Steven Louis Craft, M.Div.
“We in this nation are under satanic attack when people cannot even discern that there are only two sexes, male and female! How does Obama get the authority to decree that men can use women’s restrooms or be denied federal funding? This is nothing less than legalized blackmail. Hopefully, every school district in America will simply ignore this madness, and finally the people will demand that Obama be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. As a Christian conservative, Black clergyman, I am deeply offended, and I pray that justice will prevail,” says Craft.
From Washington, D.C.
“President Obama continues to focus his priorities on everything but the American people. Instead of focusing on the struggling economy or any number of issues plaguing our country, he decides to legalize sexual harassment,” says Gianno Caldwell, who runs a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. “Any male individual can claim an identity in the moment to follow a woman into the bathroom, thereby creating an harassing environment. This must be stopped by Congress.”
From Indiana
“The Obama Administration should be ashamed of itself for forcing the use of restrooms in public schools to transgender people. First of all, education is an issue for the states to control. Secondly, there are but two God-created genders. Male and Female,” said Tea Party activist Emery McClendon.
“Such a move will destroy our schools as our children and grandchildren will be intimidated and confused. The focus in our learning institutions shout be on the three ‘R’s, and on preparing our children for adulthood, the job market, and higher learning. Our schools are already failing, and this move will place our education system at risk of a collapse,” McClendon said.
“This is not a civil rights issue. It is a blatant abuse of people’s personal rights, and a tradition that almost every culture holds dear,” McClendon concluded.
From Missouri
“Just as the liberals use the Commerce Clause to justify any kind of tax or government overreach, now they abuse civil rights codes to justify legalizing any kind of perversion, all in name of equality. Civil rights champions were not spat upon, beaten with police batons and sometimes murdered for the right of men to go to the same restroom with little girls,” says St. Louis political consultant Christopher Arps.
From Pennsylvania
“When I was in a student at Woodside Elementary in Silver Spring, Maryland, there was something mysterious about the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms. I remember when the boys in our playground clique found out there were doors on the stalls in the girls’ bathrooms and I remember the girls being appalled there were no doors in the boys’ bathrooms. My friend David didn’t believe it, so he went into the girls’ bathroom to find out for himself… He got in trouble — a lot of trouble… and I wasn’t allowed to hang out with him for a while,” recalls the Right Reverend Council Nedd II, Ph.D., TOSF.
“Why is there such a rush to strip away the innocence of American children? Why do children need to be exposed to anything and everything at the earliest possible age? Do we really want our children growing up in a world and age where nothing is taboo?,” Nedd, who is rector of St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania, and an elected state constable, wonders.
“As a child I wish my friend David had been allowed to use the gender identity defense. However, there is an equally important issue. When you dance with the devil, the devil don’t change. The devil being the federal government in this parable. We’ve seen over the last 100 years, the consequences of relying too much on the federal government. The federal welfare system a wrought destruction on millions of poor people and slowly eroded their moral compasses, and it has destroyed the sovereignty of states and their ability to enforce their own community standards,” said Nedd.
From Virginia
“The White House is pushing a radical agenda that has no support in the language or history of existing civil rights law. And they are pursuing it by threatening to punish the most vulnerable students in public school — withholding lunch and remedial teaching assistance from poor and minority students. This is cruel and divisive and will ultimately be overturned,” said Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper, an attorney and legal commentator who taught constitutional law at George Mason University.
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Project 21 has been a leading voice of black conservatives since its founding in 1992. Its volunteer members come from all walks of life. Individual comments by Project 21 members represent the opinion of that member. Contributions to the National Center are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated, and may be earmarked for the use of Project 21.
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