Diane Roberts: Conservatives’ hysteria about genitals is silly and pointless

Conservatives used to be all about lower taxes and smaller government. These days they’re all about genitals: what you do with said genitals, with whom, and where you bare them to answer the Call of Nature.

The city council of Oxford, Alabama, defying both “political correctness” and the English language, declared that decent folk have a right to “quite [sic] solicitude [sic]” without wondering if the person in the next stall has different plumbing.

Otherwise, the restroom becomes a place of “increased venerability” [sic] with a lurking menace of “voyeurism, exhibitionism, molestation, and assault and battery.”

A new ordinance decrees that any one of them dang perverts peeing in the ladies room could get six months in the county lock-up. Oxford Council President Steven Waits said, “We want to protect our women and children.”

Yeah, because dudes in dresses in the Walmart ladies room is a huge national menace, as they’ll tell you in the North Carolina Legislature, where members hastily convened a special session to push through a law regulating how transgender persons do their business in public facilities. And here in Florida, the Marion County School Board has decreed that if you weren’t born with a penis, you can’t pee with the bros.

A young man whose family is big into “biblical modesty” became upset that another young man, a kid who was born female but now identifies as male, uses the boys’ room at Vanguard High School. According to the “modest” lad, his organ-fixated father and their Liberty Counsel lawyers, when you use the wrong bathroom, you risk a disaster of biblical proportions.

Forty years of darkness. Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together.

Or value-priced Egyptian cotton towels. In the wake of North Carolina’s hysteria, Target says it welcomes transgender people to whichever toilet “corresponds with their gender identity.”

It’s genital anarchy, y’all! The Family Research Council, those tireless monitors of people’s junk, immediately issued a fatwa, and now claims that a million outraged Americans are boycotting the big-box retailer.

Target has, of course, long been a tool of Satan: the salespeople rarely say “Merry Christmas,” and nine months ago, they stopped labelling toys for “girls” or “boys.”

No one is sure how many people will now buy from Target because they treat people with decency and courtesy. No one is sure how badly the boycott against North Carolina will hit the state’s economy. But mere jobs cannot compare to the horror of letting transgenders go wherever they like and, as the Speaker of the North Carolina House put it, “undermining civility and normalcy in our everyday lives.”

And about that “civility” and “normalcy.” You might want to pop a Xanax since it’s likely you’ve conducted your, er, bodily waste elimination next to a transgender person without knowing it. Because the only reason you’d know it is if you peek in there to see.

Which would make you the pervert.

The American Taliban love to raise the specter of “grown men” using “the little girls’ restroom,” as Sen. Ted Cruz put it.

If they have their way, the Cruzers and their fellow travelers in Florida, Alabama and North Carolina will soon insist we all hire some Potty Police to check the contents of your britches before you close the stall door.

Don’t confuse them with facts, such as there’s no evidence to suggest that transgender people hang around in bathrooms waiting to molest straight people. Or that straight people are much more likely to attack transgender people – or people they think are transgender.

Anyone wanting to protect children from unwanted sexual advances needs to keep them away from 1. Catholic priests; 2. Web-based groomers; 3. Republican members of Congress such as former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

And teach those kids that what’s between your ears is way more interesting and important than what’s between your legs.

Man, these Republicans need to get out more.

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Diane Roberts is the author of Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. She teaches at Florida State University. Column courtesy of Context Florida.