The Oklahoma legislature is, by my reckoning, certifiably bonkers. Their ideas about what is and what is not constitutional are just consistently off-base. Not too long ago, they had to be corrected by the judiciary when they tried to enact a state Constitutional amendment banning Sharia Law from being considered in judicial decisions. Now they want to impeach President Obama and pass a measure “that would allow students to claim a religious right to have separate but equal bathrooms and changing facilities to segregate them from transgender students.”
Some might question why the Obama administration would choose to introduce this controversy into a presidential campaign, but it’s really as simple as doing the right thing. I don’t know if the strong reaction was predictable. Who can predict the what will set the nuts off? The Sharia Law freakout certainly came out of nowhere, as did the sudden groupthink rejection of anthropogenic climate change.
We can’t wait around to do the right thing every time these folks might raise holy hell about it. It will be a long wait if Democrats try to find a time when defending transgender people will be uniformly popular. They are the most misunderstood and marginalized minority group in the country.
When people look back, though, they’ll have no choice but to give the Obama administration credit for being courageous and determined defenders of the LGBT community. They’ve gone further than I think anyone thought they would or could.