MA Transgender bill beaten by forcing vote on all 73 genders
Aug 18, 2018 11:42:50 GMT
Post by Admin on Aug 18, 2018 11:42:50 GMT
Massachusetts Republican beats trans driver’s license bill by forcing votes on all 73 genders
BOSTON, August 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Legislation to add a “Gender X” option to driver’s license should have been a straightforward task in the far-left state of Massachusetts, but one Republican lawmaker managed to derail the bill by taking transgender ideology to its furthest extreme.
The state Senate voted in June to approve the measure, which would have also extended the option to learner’s permits and state identification cards. No documentation would have been required to prove an applicant is neither male nor female.
“It’s a milestone,” bill sponsor Sen. Karen Spilka, a Democrat, said at the time.
Despite the state House of Representatives being just as heavily Democratic as the Senate, however, it never got the chance to send the bill to liberal Republican Gov. Charlie Baker’s desk.
In a column for the Boston Globe, New England radio host Howie Carr details how Republican Rep. Jim Lyons adopted a unique strategy for defeating the bill: forcing it to live up to its supporters’ own logic.
“Since all Democrats must admit that the number of genders is endless, how dare the commonwealth lump all the new genders together as ‘Gender X’?” Carr writes, summarizing Lyons’ facetious reasoning. “Every gender, he declared, must be listed on Massachusetts driver’s licenses! That was Lyons’ non-negotiable demand. No justice, no peace.”
Lyons told Carr he settled on demanding recognition for 73 different “genders,” as that was the number he reached by tallying the number of custom gender options Facebook offers.
Knowing that his liberal colleagues couldn’t rule any of the genders out of order without undermining the logic of transgender ideology, Lyons introduced each as a separate amendment to the bill the evening of July 31, each requiring 10 minutes of debate and three minutes to vote on.
“Number 6 added as a gender ‘cis.’ Amendment 9 — cis female, 13 — cis woman, 14 — cisgender female, 18 — cisgender woman,” Carr details. “Amendment 21 — gender fluid, 22 gender non-conforming, 23 gender questioning, 25 gender variant, 26 genderqueer.”
Six hours in, Lyons had only filed 35 of the amendments, at which point House leadership realized he was running out the clock and there wasn’t enough time before the midnight deadline to pass both the bill and the other legislation on the docket. At 10:45 p.m., they withdrew the bill.
“By now, the few remaining sane Democrats in the Legislature realized that Lyons had done them a solid, sparing them from being recorded on a roll call vote on whether to recognize the genders of pangender, polygender and cisgender,” Carr wrote, “not to mention intersex, intersex man, intersex woman and intersex person.”
“One way or another, progressivism is always a death sentence. So we may as well turn it around and use it on its perpetrators whenever we get the chance,” Conservative Review’s Steve Deace said of the incident. “That doesn’t mean becoming like them, but understanding their con and endlessly harassing them with its real-world applications.”
Deace added, “We need legions more like” Lyons, following his example to make progressives “face the full foolish force of the filth they shove down our throats with barely any resistance (if not a subsidy). Lyons called their bluff, and they called it a day.”
Legislative deadlines recently thwarted another pro-LGBT bill in the Bay State, as well. The Senate failed to reconcile different versions of a bill banning reparative or “conversion” therapy for minors before the August 1 deadline, thanks to a controversial amendment that would have required teachers and doctors to report hearing about such treatments to social services.
