While its name may suggest it is a one-trick operation, the National Organization for Marriage has serious range when it comes to being completely awful. Far from just focusing its advocacy and lobbying work to deny gay people equal marriage and adoption rights, NOM also uses its (marginal) political heft to do things like oppose basic protections for transgender teenagers.
NOM played a major role in laying the groundwork for the Prop 8 battle in California, and it is now trying to insert itself back into the state's local politics by gathering voter signatures against AB 1266, a law allowing transgender students to use school facilities and play on athletic teams that correspond to their gender identity. If NOM is successful, a measure to repeal AB 1266 would be on the November 2014 ballot.
NOM President Brian Brown, echoing the transphobic views held by mainstream commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin, denounced the law as, "Opening our most vulnerable areas at school including showers, bathrooms and changing rooms to members of the opposite sex is politically-correct madness that risks the privacy and security of our children and grandchildren."
‘They are forcing our school children to be exposed in showers and bathrooms to members of the opposite sex who claim a gender identity with that sex," Brown continued.
As Salon has previously noted, AB 1266 enshrines basic protections for transgender students into California law and ensures that trans teenagers are guaranteed the same access to school facilities and programs as their peers.
h/t Gay Star News
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