Wisconsin now appears to have become a permanent member of a very special group of Republican-led, right-wing states that perhaps can best be described as America’s States of Ignorance.
The latest confirmation our state is a prominent member came when Wisconsin announced it would join 10 other states suing President Barack Obama to stop him from preventing schools from discriminating against transgender students using the bathroom.
It has become routine for Wisconsin to join hands with other extremist Republican states, many in the South with long histories of discrimination and others led by unusually bigoted governors like Arizona’s Jan (“Show me your papers, señor!”) Brewer or Maine’s Paul (“Bring back the guillotine!”) LePage.
But most of the group’s frivolous lawsuits pursue common Republican goals such as blocking expanded health care for their state’s poorest citizens or raising clean energy standards to clean up their air and water.
It’s much more risky for 11 extremist Republican states to band together in support of North Carolina’s discriminatory transgender bathroom law. They’re inviting the same sort of disastrous backlash for their own states that North Carolina is quite deservedly experiencing.
Since North Carolina passed a law forcing transgender individuals to use public bathrooms matching the gender on their birth certificates regardless of their current sexual identities, all hell has broken loose there.
Corporations have cancelled relocation and job-expansion plans in the state. Organizations around the country are refusing to hold or attend conventions there. Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and other popular cultural attractions with a social conscience won’t play there.
Wisconsin Bathroom Bill Flopped
Wisconsin’s coalition of the willfully ignorant specifically objects to a policy directive from the U.S. Department of Education warning schools that discriminating against transgender students could result in loss of federal education funds and legal action by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch charging North Carolina with discrimination.
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The odd thing about Wisconsin’s involvement is that when a couple of its goofier right-wing Republicans, state representatives Steve Nass and Jesse Kremer, introduced one of those dumb bathroom bills in the Assembly last fall, it went nowhere, despite Republican control of the Legislature.
School districts around the state are taking the anti-discrimination directive from the Department of Education in stride. More than 60 school districts have created non-discriminatory policies to accommodate transgender students.
It is not an overstatement to say people around the country who are upset about transgender use of bathrooms simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Most likely they have never actually known a transgender person. Knowingly, at least.
That’s why they have bizarre images in their heads of savage male rapists with five-o’clock shadow and possibly fangs throwing on dresses so they can go into women’s restrooms and ravish little girls.
Surprise. A transgender woman identifies as a woman, not as a violent male predator. If any transgender bathroom safety issue exists, it would more likely involve the danger to a transgender woman in a male restroom.
Adopting a sexual identity different from the one a person was born into is not a decision anyone makes lightly. It can be a frightening, painful transformation, made even more so by hate laws rooted in ignorance.
But if there’s any possibility of stirring up ignorant people over non-existent threats from racial or sexual minorities, Republicans are always eager to exploit it with nonsensical scare stories.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about Wisconsin’s involvement this time is that Gov. Scott Walker is allowing Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel to take the lead.
When Walker was running for president, he wouldn’t allow any other Republican to take a position farther to the right than his own, no matter how ridiculous. If Donald Trump wanted to build a huge wall along the Mexican border, maybe we should look at constructing one on the Canadian border too.
Walker kept an unusually low profile after Schimel consulted him before announcing on his own as attorney general he would be joining the multi-state legal fight on transgender bathroom use, which hasn’t really been much of an issue in Wisconsin.
That raises some interesting questions. If Walker no longer wants to be out front on inflammatory right-wing issues, how serious is he about running for re-election at a time of declining poll numbers and anemic fundraising to retire his enormous $900,000 presidential campaign debt?
Maybe Walker is finally ready to give up his political dream and accept a lucrative job in the private sector, perhaps that pending opening as head of the right-wing Bradley Foundation now that its longtime chief, Michael Grebe, has decided to retire at the end of this month.
That could be good news for Wisconsin, though possibly not such great news for those hit by the collateral damage from the right-wing political battles Walker could fund around the country.
Wisconsin wouldn’t necessarily be out of the woods yet either. Schimel is making it clear there’s always another ambitious right-wing Republican eager to exploit public ignorance on inflammatory issues to see how far it can take him politically.
