This action is about a great deal more than bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect that we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we as a people and as a country have enacted to protect them. Indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country haltingly but inexorably in the direction of fairness, inclusion, and equality for all Americans.
This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in the fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation in state bans on same-sex unions that were intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. And that right of course is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution. And in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill and state after state taking aim at the LGBT community.
Now some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change. But this is not a time to act out of fear. This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, of diversity, of compassion and open-mindedness. And what we must not do—what we must never do—is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans for something that they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. And this is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not, or invents a problem that does not exist as a pretext for discrimination or harassment.
Have they run out of material or something?