Why Dallas' Sarah Jaffe and St. Vincent Joined the Chorus Singing Out Against Texas' Proposed ‘bathroom Bill'

The Texas Legislature has plenty of Very Important Issues on its very full plate, among them rescuing sexually exploited teens by not imprisoning them, fixing a Child Protective Services that imperils the lives of those it's supposed to protect and overhauling school finance without sinking public schools. For starters. But, because this is the terrified and divided world in which we now live, we're still talking about that proposed state law telling people where they can and can't go to the bathroom.And we have been for years, around the time Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick discovered that Dallas' long-on-the-books anti-bias ordinance, which prohibits discrimination when it comes to public accommodations, includes the words "gender identity." The man gives new definition to the phrase "scared straight." But so it goes and goes and goes despite mounting warnings from the Texas Association of Business, the NFL and now the NBA, Visit Dallas and every other big-city conventions and visitors bureau that passing a bill prohibiting transgender Texans from using bathrooms that match their gender identity will gut the state's economy by the hundreds of millions, quite possibly.  Continue reading...