Another Leftist Probe Goes Down to Defeat -- For Now

Nobody’s perfect

Once they get their foot in the door, there’s no stopping the Left, which wields perfectly neutral words like “discrimination” as if there were a prima-facie bad thing. The latest example came in Houston, where even liberal Texans shot down — for now — a so-called “anti-discrimination” ordinance that would have let biological males into women’s public restrooms on their own say-so. Particularly note the slant that this story, in the Atlantic, takes:

Houston would seem, at first glance, an unlikely the site for the gay-rights movement’s first major setback since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The nation’s fourth-largest city has elected a lesbian mayor three consecutive times without much controversy, and in 2014, its city council approved an ordinance protecting residents from discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and 13 other factors. But when that same proposal came before the electorate on Tuesday, it lost out to an opposition campaign armed with a startlingly simple message: “No men in women’s bathrooms.” Opponents led 61 to 39, with 66 percent of the precincts reporting on Tuesday night.

After a hard-fought campaign that drew national attention from Hollywood celebrities and presidential candidates, voters rejected the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or Proposition 1, handing a victory to conservative critics who argued that its expansive protections for transgender people could endanger women and children. Championed by the city’s outgoing mayor, Annise Parker, the ordinance represented an early test of the gay-rights movement’s effort to guarantee that Americans who just secured the right to marry would not face discrimination in employment, housing, or public accommodations. Many of the classes listed in the ordinance—race, sex, age, and religion, among others—are already protected under federal law, but sexual orientation and gender identity are not.

Proposition 1 was only on the ballot this year because the Texas Supreme Court in July struck down the ordinance passed by the city council, ruling that the question of anti-discrimination protections must be put before the voters. For supporters, the fall campaign featured a straightforward message about equality and inclusiveness. For opponents, it became all about bathrooms….  The campaign was as explicitly based on fear as any in modern memory.

And bathrooms won, as Texas voters said to hell with with “equality and inclusiveness,” which they and the rest of the country are just now figuring out mean a wholesale destruction of cultural norms as the descendants of the Frankfurt School continue their merry work to overturn thousands of years of human history. The war against the Left is partly a fight over the language, which we are losing, and this is a good example. “Transgender” bathroom “rights” has gone down in Houston. But it will keep coming back until heteronormativity is destroyed.