Governor Shingles...

Governor Shingles...  Reader and fellow Jamulian Celeste S. passed along this article by Jim Hughes at the Daily Caller – and how could I not like an article that starts out like this:

As a fourth generation Californian who lived through the first Jerry Brown administration — or as I like to call it, the tunnel-boat scene from Willy Wonka — back in the ‘70s, I always considered a Jerry Brown governorship to be like the chicken pox. It’s horrible, you have to suffer though it, it leaves scars, but the good news is that you can never get it again. Then a friend reminded me that chicken pox can lie dormant for years, coming back as its more virulent, painful, adult cousin: The shingles.

Well, Governor Shingles is at it again.

For those of you who don’t live in the Bronze State (we lost our gold AAA rating a long time ago), Governor Brown and the State Legislature’s Democrat super-majority have been passing an all-out orgy of Liberal spending bills ranging from the bizarre to the absurd. In July, they took time out from building their $98 Billion dollar bullet train to nowhere long enough to address perhaps the most pressing issue of our times: “Gender neutral bathrooms” for K-12 school children.

While I greatly enjoyed Mr. Hughes' style – reminds me a bit of Mark Steyn – the issue he's writing about remains unsettled in my mind.  I posted about this back in August, when Governor Moonbeam Shingles signed the bill into law.

There's a lot of angst about this bill, but it's not at all clear to me how well-founded it is.  I haven't been able to find out exactly how a child's “gender identity” would be established.  A lot of people are assuming (as Hughes is) that it would simply be on the child's say-so.  I don't think even our public school administrators would be that stupid, though I certainly don't rule out the possibility.  More likely, I think, is that some sort of protocol will be established to ascertain the genuineness of a claimed transgendered identity.  If there is such a protocol, and if it's well designed, then I'm actually not opposed to this law – based on my own experiences with transgendered people, detailed in that earlier post.

If, on the other hand, there is no reasonably accurate protocol, and children can simply claim a gender identity – well, then, California's parents have every right to be upset, and we all have every reason to heap scorn upon our bought-and-paid-for legislators and our addled Governor.  Of course, they deserve our scorn in any case :)