President Joe Biden, on the verge of celebrating his first anniversary in office, is poised to resort to the old executive order ploy to advance legislation he has been unable to move through Congress.
Take the Equality Act – please.
Politics creates an environment of euphemisms that tend to make policies disingenuous or incomprehensible. But there has rarely been a better example of Orwellian legislation that seeks to undermine what it claims to want to enhance than what the Democrats have concocted with the Equality Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives in 2019 but failed in the Senate.
The bill passed by a 224-to-206 vote along party lines in 2021 again in the House. Three Republicans joined Democrats to vote in favor of the legislation. But it now lingers in that legislation twilight zone between the House and Senate.
It would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
But Biden is reportedly prepared to sign an executive order that would make legislate a key component of the Equality Act into law: putting biological male prisoners into the same facilities as female prisoners.
It is only too easy to see how this policy could be used as a legal precedent for a host of other accommodations that the Equality Act seeks to prevent: such as putting biological males into female shelters or forcing salons to shave the pubic hair of males who think they are females.
I’m not making this up.
There is a consistent voice of reason in the United States Senate and his name is Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK). Cotton is rarely behind the machinations of Joe Biden or whoever is whispering the weekly marching orders into his ears and Cotton introduced a bill to cut off Biden’s potential executive order at the pass.
"President Biden’s plan to house male and female prisoners together will put women in danger," Cotton said in a statement. "Documented cases prove that placing men — including ones who ‘identify’ as female — in women’s prisons puts female inmates at increased risk of sexual assault. My bill will stop the president’s ill-conceived plan and keep men and women separated in federal prison."
Cotton realizes that Biden has only managed to pass 90% of his agenda – all of it disastrous – through executive orders. He began his presidency with a flurry of leftist dictates and he appears ready to mark his first year in office with more. If Biden can force prisons to allow transgender “rights” to trump those of women, he won’t necessarily have to worry about passing the Equality Act.
The Equality Act might as well be called the Inequality Act because it is all about providing privilege to a few while stripping many of their essential rights. It will especially target religious liberty and the basic human rights of women.
Just why does the Left pretend there is a dire need to expand rights as if everyone in America doesn’t already possess the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And they do this by granting special privileges to some and restricting the basic rights of others. There is only so much liberty in the freedom pie and it is only when he allocates rights on the basis of individuals and not groups that we have true equality. That is precisely why identity politics divides America and leaves us all feeling less free and less capable of achieving our happiness.
What bills like this actually do is erode individual rights to grant special status to groups in society. The left is committed to jettisoning individual rights in favor of collective rights. And the problem with collective rights is that it creates a society of competing groups: tribalism. So those with the most power have the most rights.
But what are the advocates of the Equality Act seeking:
"The LGBT community has waited long enough," Rep. David Cicilline, (D-RI), a co-sponsor of the bill said before the vote last year. ."The time has come to extend the blessings of liberty and equality to all of Americans regardless of who they are and who they love."
What exactly has the LGBT “community” been denied? Is homosexuality illegal? Is their media presence not sufficiently large or influential. Are they being herded into camps or publicly shamed as the non-vaxxed are in the United States and other countries?
We cannot know how much of the legislation that Biden is currently promoting is the material he actually believes in. Certainly, there was a time when he would not have shut down the Keystone XL pipeline for no apparent reason other than to appease environmental extremists. And he certainly would not have thought putting biological males alongside females in the confines of prison was a cutting-edge human rights issue.
Because, you see, this whole issue is just plain ridiculous but we have moved so far to the left in codifying not rights but the special status that any outrageous demand for the privilege is taken seriously and sometimes granted.
But when someone’s demand for privilege supersedes another person’s basic right to life and liberty then it is time to cry foul and demand a return to sanity.
As a heterosexual white male, I do not have unlimited rights. I can wake up tomorrow and decide that I’m a female Latina but that won’t make it so. There is still something called reality. I might demand that others accept my fantasy. I might dress the part and demand that others address me as I choose.
But as soon as my choice interferes with someone else’s right to safety and security, it becomes a chimeric conception with no legal basis.
Thank God that Tom Cotton gets this. Joe Biden has forgotten it long ago.