GOP Senate Candidate Claims LGBT Protections Threaten ‘Privacy Rights Of Women In Public Restrooms’

A GOP candidate vying for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabanow (D-MI) in the fall is urging a local town to abandon a legislative effort to protect gays, lesbians and transgender people from discrimination. Gary Glenn, the American Family Association of Michigan president, has written a letter to the city of Mount Pleasant, warning city commissioners that the measure could threaten children’s privacy in “public facilities”:

We’re hopeful that in a time when local governments face many real and pressing challenges, you do not wish to embroil your community in a debate that typically includes homosexual activists’ characterization of Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army and the Boy Scouts as bigots comparable to the Ku Klux Klan, or whether a man who claims to be a woman should have a ‘right’ enforced by city law to share the women’s shower at a local health club with you or your mother or daughter or sister.

“We respectfully urge you not to even consider adopting such a discriminatory and volatile proposal which is clearly a solution in search of a non-existent problem, intended only to advance homosexual activists’ drive to have homosexual behavior and cross-dressing defined by law and endorsed by city government as the moral, social, and legal equivalents of immutable characteristics such as race, ethnic background, and sex.” [...]

“On behalf of our supporters in Mt. Pleasant, we urge you not to adopt such a discriminatory ordinance, which has proven in other jurisdictions to be used to violate the civil and religious free speech rights…and which also poses a threat to the privacy rights of women and children in public restrooms and other public facilities.”

Glenn “led a similar effort in Holland, where the city council eventually rejected the ordinance,” MLive reports.