Chris Christie tells supporters, “I don’t think we should be making life more confusing for our children.”
Chris Christie was asked in New Hampshire on Monday about laws that allow transgender people to use the restroom that fits their gender identity. A concerned woman from California told the New Jersey governor that in her state, “children from K-12 can use any bathroom that they choose, at the time, if they feel like they’re a girl, if they feel like they’re a boy.”
Christie is actually familiar with those laws designed to support transgender people. In August he vetoed a bill that would have helped transgender people change their birth certificates to accurately reflect their gender identity. He also laughed about the veto on conservative talk radio.
Christie similarly chose to joke with the California woman, who reportedly was very concerned about that transgender people nationwide might use the restroom that reflects their gender identity.
“Men go to men’s rooms, women go to women’s rooms and there really shouldn’t be a whole lot of confusion about that — public accommodations,” Christie said, speaking about the laws in his state. “And I don’t think we should be making life more confusing for our children.”
CNN reports that then Christie “quickly pivoted to his bigger concern that terrorism is making growing up too confusing for children.”
“Life is confusing enough right now for our children,” Christie said. “Think about those kids in Los Angeles who last week had their entire district closed because of a threat. Think about what they felt like the next day when they went back to school. Did they feel completely comfortable, did they feel like they were safe? How did their mothers and fathers feel when they sent them to school that day? And now today the Nashua [New Hampshire] schools are closed, based on a threat as well. How are those kids going to feel when they go back to school?”
He then cited the San Bernardino attacks as proof that “every place in America is a potential target for terrorism” before coming back to his broader point that “children learn better, grow up better, mature better when they live in a safe and secure and loving environment.”
And Christie continued spinning the two issues as though they were somehow related.
“The fact though is that we want our kids not to have to decide which bathroom they get to go in. And not to be subject to peer pressure about which one to go in. And not to be subject to the embarrassment that could come with going in a bathroom where somebody maybe doesn’t agree that they should be in there or not,” Christie said.
“Why do we do this to our children? It doesn’t make any sense. So I don’t know. I’m the common sense guy from New Jersey, you know, I don’t think life needs to be this complicated. I think it needs to be a lot more straightforward.”
Jon Green at AmericaBlog smartly weighed in.
“If anything, the wild-eyed paranoia that led to the district to err too far on the side of caution is the most confusing thing about the whole episode, and Christie, by leaving out the fact that the terror ‘threat’ in Los Angeles wasn’t at all credible, is adding to that confusion,” Green writes today.
“Either way, that has precisely nothing to do with gender identity — which is made much more confusing when a teenager is told that their sense of self is actually incorrect.”
“Christie is effectively saying that we can save our kids the hassle of being bullied by their classmates by having the government do the bullying for them,” Green concludes. “If we don’t let trans kids be trans, Christie argues, then no one will make fun of them for being trans. It’s so simple! Just use the government to cover everyone’s eyes and plug everyone’s ears, and the issue (because it is an issue) will go away on its own!”
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Image by Marc Nozell via Flickr and a CC license