MFI led the charge on Beacon Hill against the Bathroom Bill at yesterday’s legislative hearing. We had several pro-family panels of experts standing up for the right to privacy and security for all Massachusetts citizens in intimate spaces. These included lawyers, pastors and teachers, as well as MFI’s own legal counsel and myself.
Unlike most hearings, there was meaningful dialogue between the committee members and those who were testifying. Pro-family champion Jim Lyons, state representative from Andover, asked many tough questions of the bill’s advocates including Attorney General Maura Healey.
Both Jim and I took the bill to task for ignoring the rights of women and children at the expense of men who wish to express themselves as women. We were both met with the same retort: if women are uncomfortable in bathrooms with men who claim to be women, that is no different than when whites were uncomfortable using the same bathrooms as blacks 50 years ago. Fortunately, MFI’s own Jonathan Alexandre, himself a Black American, dismantled this argument.
“I reject this claim as false politics and intellectually dishonest,” Jonathan began in his statement. “No other group of individuals, including those who desire to express themselves as a different sex than how they were born, has ever been enslaved. They’ve never been viewed as property. No man who expresses himself as woman has ever had to drink from a transgender water fountain. No woman that believes that she is actually a man has ever been forced to sit in the back of a bus in a transgender section.”“This bill is not about lunch counters. This bill is not about folks being forced to sit at the back of the bus. This bill has specific language in it that targets bathrooms and locker rooms. And while it is true that there was a time in our country when bathrooms were labeled ‘white only’ or ‘colored only,’ we as a society have rejected that segregation because we have recognized there is no rational basis for limiting bathroom access based on the color of someone’s skin. However, there is a rational basis for requiring biological men to use the men’s room and biological women to use the women’s room. That’s the whole purpose of having separate bathrooms for the two sexes.”
You can watch his whole testimony here.Today, the House will be in session, and they need to hear from YOU about this dangerous Bathroom Bill.Call 617.722.2000 and ask for your legislator by name; if you don’t know your legislator’s name,send them an email here through our advocacy page.
When calling your legislator, ask him or her to oppose HB 1577, the Bathroom Bill, and remind him or her that in 2011, a public firestorm kept public accommodations out of the Transgender Bill that passed that year, maintaining the safety and privacy of women and children in locker rooms, rest rooms, hospitals and homeless shelters. This legislation would strip those protections away, and open our law enforcement communities and businesses to costly civil rights lawsuits. Tell your legislator to urge the Speaker of the House to focus on other, more pressing issues on Beacon Hill.
You can also sign the petition of our friends Renew MA Coalition opposing the Bathroom Bill.
Please keep the pressure up so that this potential violation of our families’ privacy won’t become law in Massachusetts.
For our families,
P.S. Don’t forget that the second national protest against Planned Parenthood is THIS Saturday! We encourage you to be a voice for the voiceless right here in Massachusetts. For locations or more information, click here.