Yes, you unfortunately read that correctly. In a stunning display of mental gymnastics, Beverly Goldstein, a 70-year-old Republican woman who is running for a seat in the House of Representatives, in a tweet blames illiterate black people who don't attend church every Sunday for the new anti-discrimination bills protecting LGBT people that were passed in Ohio recently, reports Queerty.
Can anyone make sense of that? Or find any correlation between illiterate people and transgender people? If she's looking for the minority vote, she's going about it completely wrong. To make matters worse, Goldstein is running against Marcia Fudge, a black woman, who called Goldstein's tweet racist and homophobic. Here is the tweet:
And you can view the 66% illiteracy statistic Seeds of Literacy While it doesn't mention the races of the people involved in this statistic, it's safe to assume that the entire 66% is not comprised solely of black people, nor does it say anything about church or anti-discrimination bills. So what is she even talking about? Her husband, Michael, offers an explanation. He says
"If most of them understood that this ordinance would allow transgender males, or sex offenders who masquerade as transgender males, to use women’s bathrooms regularly used by mothers and daughters, thereby endangering the safety of girls and women, they probably would have brought pressure to bear on their elected county representatives not to bring the resolution in the first place. But those who cannot read cannot be expected to know about the negative effects of the resolution."
Will anyone tell him that transgender males use the men's room or??? He also offers no evidence of the perceived negative effects of the resolution, which leads me to believe he just wants people to accept what he says without question.
What's truly frightening is that there are still people in this country who think like the Goldsteins do. Transgender people just want to use the restroom that matches their gender identity, not to go and do nefarious things to women in public bathrooms. Perhaps Mrs. Goldstein should take her own advice and read up on transgender rights. There are currently nineteen states plus the District of Columbia that allow transgender people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, according to CNN. Surely we would have heard about sexual predators taking advantage of those protections by now, no?
h/t: Queerty, Seeds of Literacy, CNN