The headlines across America have been obsessed with bathrooms in recent days, the attorney general of the United States has held a news conference on the subject, Target Corp. has publicly addressed it, Texas officials have cited it, lawsuits have been filed, and more.
All because a minority of citizens say their belief they are the opposite gender from their physical attributes requires the rest of the nation to allow them to use the restroom, locker room, shower room, and more, of the sex with which they identify, not the sex they are physically.
Advertisement - story continues below
Target has promoted the idea, Texas officials are outraged at the store's lack of protections for women and children in restrooms, North Carolina and the Department of Justice have dueling lawsuits pending, and there's little doubt at some point the U.S. Supreme Court will actually issue a ruling on toilets.
TRENDING: WATCH: Top DOJ official says she's 'not familiar' with landmark censorship case against Biden
But one expert opinion, from a top-flight leftist lawyer who worked for the ACLU, in fact, launching the group's Women's Rights Project, who served as the ACLU's general counsel for eight years, was on the board of directors for nearly the same time, and more, says separate bathrooms are just fine.
"Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy," she wrote in a 1975 commentary printed by the Washington Post.
Advertisement - story continues below
"Individual privacy, a right of constitutional dimension, is appropriately harmonized with the equality principle," she wrote.
The author?
Ruth Ginsburg, now on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Her comments applied to her lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment, which eventually was torpedoed by Americans. It would have made "equal" men and women across the U.S., and Ginsburg's commentary was aimed at dispelling those "horrible" things that opponents cited.
Advertisement - story continues below
Among her topics of discussion were labor laws that protect women, homemakers' rights, those "unisex restrooms," and more.
She pooh-poohed the idea that the ERA would demand such accommodations.
"The 'potty issue' is likely to remain one of those ultimate questions never pressed to final solution," she wrote. "(Who would bring the testing lawsuit – women, who seek access to men's WCs, or men who seek access to women's?)"
The comments were noted by legal commentator Eugene Volokh, whose commentaries also are hosted by the Washington Post.
Advertisement - story continues below
He explained her April 7, 1975, comment was "explaining why the Equal Rights Amendment shouldn't be opposed based on 'the 'potty issue.'' The Equal Rights Amendment would have specifically barred sex discrimination by the government."
He pointed out that the Obama administration is citing a possibly violation of Title IX in a transgender-restroom fight in North Carolina, and the federal government is citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act in its legal assault on the state of North Carolina.
"Then-Professor Ginsburg's argument would apply as much to Title IX or to the Civil Rights Act as it did to the Equal Rights Amendment," he wrote.
He continued, "But for now, I do think it's worth noting that, when sex equality rules were championed in the 1970s, now-Justice Ginsburg – one of the most prominent feminist lawyers of her era – rejected as 'emphatically' unsound the argument that those rules might lead to males being allowed to use women's restrooms."
Advertisement - story continues below
Related stories (Story continues below):
Family advocate: Impeach Obama over bathrooms
Obama 'has no legal authority' to make bathroom decree
Obama' obsession' allows men to choke girls in bathrooms
Advertisement - story continues below
Obama orders schools to open bathrooms to transgenders
'We will not sell out our children to the federal government'
Pentagon tackles 'practical issues' of transgender troops
Related columns:
Advertisement - story continues below
Why I'm thankful for Obama's bathroom edict by Joseph Farah
Obama jumps the shark on bathroom insanity by Matt Barber
Washington's argument in such cases rest on the belief that in 1964, and shortly after, when the Civil Rights Act was adopted and its application clarified, that members of Congress would insist it included the right for men who say they are women to use a women's restroom in public, despite the threat that might pose to women and children there.
Ginsburg, of course, was one of the integral votes in the 2015 Supreme Court creation of same-sex "marriage" across the nation. Her vote came even though a legal organization had asked her to recuse since she publicly had advocated for the status while the case was pending by performing same-sex "weddings."
Advertisement - story continues below
The ERA, faced with the intense opposition of one Phyllis Schlafly, whose "A Choice Not an Echo" came out the same year as the Civil Rights Act was adopted, failed.
Schlafly was rocketed into national prominence by the book, and her conservative politics.
She has been a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972 when she started the national volunteer organization Eagle Forum. She spent 10 years fighting the ERA movement.
She served on the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution to which she was appointed by President Reagan, has testified before more than 50 congressional and state legislative committees on constitutional, national defense and family issues, and had written or edited dozens of books.
Advertisement - story continues below
Her monthly newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, has been published for nearly half a century.
WND has detailed the fight in North Carolina, where the governor sued Washington on Monday for its vast "overreach" and "bullying" for interfering in the state's adoption of a law that protects women and children in restrooms.
It requires people to use the restroom of their birth certificate gender.
Advertisement - story continues below
The law provides for protections for women and children in locker rooms that they would not be confronted by a man exposing himself, or something similar in restrooms. It also provides for transgenders, that when they complete their physical reassignment surgery and have their sex changed on their birth certificates, they are to use the restroom that is designated for that sex.
The North Carolina governor warned the latest move by Obama is an attempt to declare all restrooms nationwide open to men who say they are women, or vice versa.
His comments:
Advertisement - story continues below
Attorney General Loretta Lynch later in the day tried to catch up with North Carolina, announcing a civil-rights action against the state over the law, prompting conservative commentator Pat Buchanan to call her actions "ridiculous."
"That a grown man has a right to use a girls bathroom or girls locker room is ridiculous," he said. He said it equally is ridiculous to think that the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to the issue.
Target stores recently promoted their transgender-promoting practices, and the state of Texas has demanded in response access to the corporation's plans to protect women and children in such scenarios.
Bathrooms on the brain
Advertisement - story continues below
The Obama administration's move to open bathrooms and ignore biology even drew a satirical video from the the Family Research Council in which a narrator pointed out: "So … while ISIS is infiltrating America … President Obama seems confused about human biology. While Russia taunts our military … President Obama is fighting for men to access to women's locker rooms. While Iran and North Korea fire ballistic missiles … President Obama is demanding grown men have the right to use women's bathrooms.
"Who knows what’s next? President Obama could issue an executive order wiping out single gendered bathrooms in national parks … or in federal buildings … or tell the TSA to stop requiring those who fly to declare their biological sex. It's absurd."
The video:
Child abuse
The American College of Pediatricians has warned of the danger of allowing children to "impersonate" the opposite sex.
"A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking," the group said. "Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse."
WND columnist Jane Orient, M.C., asserted pushing boys into girls locker rooms is an idea based on "seriously flawed assumptions."
"In fact, the science cannot be clearer. There are two sexes. Leaving aside rare conditions such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, this is absolutely plain at birth, and not a matter of arbitrary 'assignment.' A person with a Y chromosome is through-and-through male in every cell in his body. If 'Caitlyn' Jenner's skeleton is dug up a few hundred years from now, it will unequivocally be identified as male.
"Second, they both assume that it is possible to convert a male into a female and that doctors are helping a patient affirm his true identity by so doing," she wrote.
"In fact, it is possible for a male to become a eunuch or female impersonator, but he will never be able to be somebody's natural mother. And what do we do to a boy to try to make him appear female? Do we have any information about the long-term effects of female hormones starting in childhood? Maybe we will eventually, if we follow today's experimental subjects – who are too young to consent and are likely not having the possible consequences spelled out. If castrated, they will lose forever the prospect of having natural offspring. And what will genital surgery do to urinary continence? How will hormones affect their risk of breast cancer? What about blood clots and strokes? And osteoporosis and fractures as they age? If adult athletes are forbidden to 'dope' with steroids, why is it acceptable for children?
"There are excellent reasons not to have boys and girls undressing in front of each other, and a transgender 'girl' is just a wedge. The real agenda is to further the sexual and cultural revolution: to undermine the family, to stigmatize the Christian faith and indeed all traditional morality, and to break down all resistance to a totalitarian state that dictates belief and behavior," she warned.