On a normal day, spotting the House speaker at a UFC fight with a posse of future Cabinet leaders would be all the buzz. But Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) epic weekend (which included sharing McDonald’s cheeseburgers with self-avowed health nut Robert Kennedy Jr.) was overshadowed by a bigger brawl — this time, over Capitol bathrooms.
For days, Washington, DC has been swept up in a debate that would’ve been inconceivable even 10 years ago: where to send Sarah McBride, the first trans-identifying member of Congress, when nature calls. By Monday, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.) had introduced a bill protecting the complex’s women-only spaces like restrooms and locker rooms from biological men. In the end, it wasn’t necessary. Johnson declared that “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman — and a man cannot become a woman,” essentially squashing any talk of an open-gender free-for-all.
While McBride took the news in stride, declaring that “this effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me,” his Democratic colleagues dissolved into hysteria. In an animated freakout, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accused Mace of somehow “endangering all women and girls,” because in the warped mind of leftists, safeguarding female spaces “results in women and girls who are primed for assault.” Her nonsensical rant, which was captured on video, suggested that Republicans want “little girls and women to drop trou in front of — who? An investigator? … It’s disgusting. … Everybody should reject it. It’s gross.”
Not surprisingly, Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus (CEC) piled on, calling Johnson’s decision a “holier-than-thou decree” that was “cruel and unnecessary.”
“How will this even be enforced?” Pocan asked. “Will the Sergeant at Arms post officers in bathrooms? Will everyone who works at the Capitol have to carry around their birth certificate or undergo a genetic test? … [This is] a ploy to distract from [Republicans’] inability to govern and failure to deliver for the American people.”
Of course, as most exit pollsters will tell you, respecting biological reality is delivering for the American people. No issue moved voters away from Kamala Harris more than her fixation on trans radicalism. But that message obviously hasn’t been received at Democratic headquarters, where members are only making the ideological canyon with the average voter wider.
“We all know this is a petty, hateful distraction,” Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) raged on X. “There’s no bottom to the cruelty.”
Even McBride’s benevolent façade started to slip as the week wore on. In an interview with CBS News, he tried to paint himself as the bigger person in “contrast with the grandstanding that we’re seeing right now.”
“Everything was fine,” he argued, “until some members of the small Republican conference majority decided to get headlines and to manufacture a crisis.”
For Johnson, the whole controversy is surreal.
“You had to take on some issues you probably never thought you would have to address as speaker…” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pointed out in Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill.”
“Yeah,” the Louisianan responded, “we live in unprecedented times.” At the end of the day, though, “This is an issue of first impression for the Congress. We’ve never had to face this before in all of our history. But,” he acknowledged, “now we do. … And so, we had to come out and speak with moral clarity about the issue.”
Johnson pointed to the statement he had to make about men being men and women being women.
“I mean, it’s sad that we have to articulate this, but that’s the truth. And then I came out to clarify the policy. The speaker of the House is in charge of the Capitol and its grounds and buildings. And I said that single-sex facilities will be respected as such. Only those of the biological sex of the restroom or the changing room or the locker room will be allowed to use those facilities.”
But the reality is, “What else could we do?” he wanted to know. But what the media’s intentionally ignored is the flipside of the speaker’s comments.
“I also said — in all Christian charity and consistent with our worldview — is that we treat everybody with dignity and with respect. And we will,” Johnson vowed. “And so, this is not against anyone. It’s pro-women, and women deserve to have women’s-only spaces. I think that’s a pretty simple premise.”
As most conservatives have argued for some time, none of this happened in a vacuum.
“These were policy decisions that had been made over the last decade and a half that brought us to this point,” Perkins observed. “And you and I have talked about this. People thought they could change fundamental things such as marriage and human sexuality and not end up here, when in fact this is the logical outcome. And I don’t know how much further it might go, but there’s a lot behind this.”
“Well there is,” the speaker agreed. “And I think we have to speak with clarity and with compassion. And I think we [can] do both those things. I ask myself every day, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Really? I mean, in this situation, what would Jesus do? I think He would hold, obviously, to the principles that we believe in, but He would also have compassion for those involved. And there’s a lot of people who need that right now. And we’re trying to do both at the same time.”
This article appeared originally here.
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