OK, I’m not trying to alarm anyone, but I think Glenn Beck is planning on molesting kids at Hershey Park (you know, the amusement park where everything is made of chocolate, I’m pretty sure).
I know that sounds alarmist. But hear me out.
On May 20, Hershey Park announced that employees and visitors are welcome to use whatever restroom corresponds to their gender identity.
“(T)he park has and will always strive to accommodate all guests and employees — including members of the LGBT community — to ensure those visiting or working at Hershey Park are comfortable and feel secure,” the statement reads in part. “Guests and employees may continue to use the restrooms with which they gender-identify, or are welcome to use the many family restrooms available across the destination.”
In a sane country, this would hardly be exceptional. In fact, the statement wouldn’t have needed to be released at all because of how trans people using bathrooms isn’t a problem in real life, but it has been made into a problem by the bigoted and fantastical imaginations of our nation’s right-wing loons.
And that includes Beck.
In response to Hershey Park’s statement, Beck went nuts. Or nuttier, I guess.
“[T]his is not normal,” Beck said May 23. “The velocity of the way this is being jammed down everybody’s throat is not normal. This isn’t an outcry from the people. This is .3 percent of the population.”
While nobody really knows what percentage of the population is transgender, Beck seems to be saying that if a group is small enough, then “the people” have no obligation to treat them with basic human decency or allow them basic rights like taking a leak at Hershey Park.
I’d also like to point out that Beck and people who think like him are the only ones trying to jam anything down anybody’s throat. The North Carolina law dictating where people can and can’t pee helped spark “the bathroom fight” by addressing a nonexistent problem. And Beck’s right. That’s not normal. Places like Hershey Park and Target are merely reacting to this insanity. They didn’t start this fight, but props to them for being unwilling to sit on the sidelines while douchebags with Jesus complexes try to bully an already-vulnerable group of people.
Beck goes on to make a comparison to “the gay-marriage thing that was pushed through by the administration,” adding that in “another five or 10 years we would have gotten there anyway. It was already on that path.”
(A personal note: I’m sure as hell glad I didn’t have to wait another decade or so before Beck decided I was allowed to be married. Thank you, Supreme Court.)
“Transgender bathrooms have come out of nowhere, and are being jammed down our throat,” Beck went on.
I’d like to point out that “transgender bathrooms” isn’t even, like, the issue. By and large, people aren’t demanding that trans people get their very own bathrooms (though there are some folks who think that banishing trans men and women to some “other” bathroom is a solution to this “problem”).
But then Beck goes off the rails. “I guarantee you,” he says, “I guarantee you the next stop on this train is pedophilia. I guarantee it.”
Wait, what? Back up the train.
There is no logical or evidence-based connection between transgenderism and pedophilia. We’re talking about gender identity, not molesting or raping children.
Of course, Beck thinks that allowing trans women to use the women’s room is the same thing as letting any and all men use the women’s room. Men like, um, him? Because, by and large, cisgender men are those most likely to molest kids.
So really the only way that Beck can “guarantee” us that pedophilia comes next is if he, himself, plans on making it so.
The man has never been of sound mind. Let’s just hope his “guarantee” is just more of the wacky hyperbole that he likes to spout.
In the meantime, let’s go buy a Hershey bar at Target, everyone! n
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock and roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.