Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Unisex Toilets


Last week, my wife and I went to the Noguchi sculpture exhibit in New York with some friends. When I went to the toilet I found that they only had unisex toilets. Now, I had encountered unisex toilets before but somehow, this time, it struck me how insidious and dangerous this practice was.

Just think about it. The distinction between women and men is being denigrated in not giving each of them recognition for the distinctiveness of their sex. After all men and women are different. As it has often been said "Viva la difference". When men go to a public toilet they use urinals. In unisex toilets there are no urinals. Men have always been accustomed to having entrance to rooms for such intimate proceedings without having to wait in line for long periods of time, while women have had to wait an inexorable length. While women have often argued that this is unfair, it has often been said, "Life is not fair" and men will find that with unisex toilets, still another of their God-given privileges has been taken away, and all by a bunch of "do gooder liberals.”

Some might say what is the harm in this. But this misses the point. When we change social customs the long-range consequences cannot be foreseen.

Right now these unisex toilets only allow a man or a women to inhabit them one at a time, but it is a short step to having toilets where men and women cohabit and mingle in such intimate endeavors, and then modesty evaporates and men become like beasts, and fornicate and commit adultery, and it is the end of the family as we know it. Beware my friends, Sodom and Gomorra is not far away.

Let us look for a moment at other developments and the slippery slope they have put us on. It wasn't so long ago that the sale of condoms was prohibited. It was recognized that their sale would allow sex for pleasure instead of procreation and while the bible doesn't specifically say that sex for pleasure is a sin it does say, "People the earth.” It seems we have, in fact, done that far beyond any dreams that the early Jews or early Christians may have envisioned, but they failed to tell us when we ought to stop so, I guess, like Golem, we must endlessly obey these commands. But those who know God's intent have told us that God's intent was for pleasure without procreation to be a sin. And if that wasn't enough things didn't stop there. Next, we got the pill and soon everyone was fornicating and adulterating and worse of all they started she-sheing and he-heing, which the Bible tells us is a sin. But God had had enough. And he punished us by sending the worse plague upon us since the Black death in the form Aids. And he even punished us by sending terrorists against us, or so the Reverend Pat Robertson told us. Yes, we are told by a man who speaks directly to God and our President, that the terrorists are not evil, but are the vengeance that God has sent against us for our sins, and that we must make war against sinners and liberals and Democrats, and when they are eliminated this scourge will go from among our midst.

And how did our "activist" US Supreme Court meet this challenge? They struck down the Texas sodomy laws and said that a sovereign state could not punish people for committing unspeakable sins between consensual adults in the privacy of their bedrooms, as though it makes a difference where sins are committed. And the slippery slope continued. And now another judge has said that people of the same sex have the same rights as people of the opposite sex, and they may even marry. Well, you may not see the connection between unisex bathrooms and these unspeakable developments, but don't you see if we don't draw lines we get on slippery slopes and then where are we. People start wanting more and more rights and they don't understand that the right to sin is not a right.

It wasn't so long ago that we didn't have women in the military and a lot of the men said that they didn't belong. But the women proved that they were just as good as the men when it came their military tasks. And after a while a lot of the men found that it was nice to have women out there with them. After all here was an opportunity for sex. But often the women didn't want sex with some of their male counterparts or with their superiors, so they were intimidated or forced. And the women complained. They didn't understand that that was part of their military function.   And so when they complained, the officer corps investigated the complainants and ended their careers. They didn't do too much investigating of the rapists because we all know that, "boys will be boys" and where is the esprit de corps of the women.

Ah, slippery slopes. Who can forget that before the '60s their was no race mixing. They didn't have the same toilets for African-Americans and whites and they felt if they allowed race mixing there, or anywhere, African-Americans would soon be asking for all sorts of other things, like the right to vote, and they warned that the next thing you know there would be miscegenation. They were right. If you look around today you see a lot of couples of mixed races and African-Americans are allowed to vote (at least in most cases when they are not barred by phony felony lists like in Florida or by other imaginative means), but by and large they are allowed to vote.

So be forewarned! Don't shrug your shoulders when you see unisex toilets. You never know what it could lead to.

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