People are trying to make the transgender bathroom issue complicated. It's not.
Harford County Public Schools not only did the right thing, but also the only thing it could in the face of last week's federal government order that transgender students, faculty or whomever could use the bathroom of their choosing.
Our Constitution provides basic protections for all Americans – heterosexual, homosexual or transgender. It has taken centuries for that message to be clearly interpreted and stated. It might take as long for it to be clearly understood.
We would expect nothing less from a country whose government was passed on the purported principal that all men are created equal. That didn't extend to the African Americans who were enslaved by those white men who were all created equal.
Abraham Lincoln ended slavery on Jan. 1, 1863 when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that banned slavery in the United States. That was also done by executive order, the same government action that has those opposed to transgender rights all atwitter.
Lincoln's act supposedly meant all men were created equal, but it didn't as white people did what they could to continue subjugating the race the president had freed.
A century later, another president, Lyndon B. Johnson, put his political legacy on the line by pushing the Civil Rights Act, that supposedly ended the inequality of the races, through Congress.
Many decades after Lincoln's controversial act issued in the middle of the Civil War, the all-men-are-created-equal started to include women. On May 19, 1919 the Suffragette Act was passed, putting women on the long road to equality. Many claim the journey to equality for women hasn't reached its destination.
Throughout American history, those with the protections that our rights gave them have fought to keep from being forced to extend those rights to others.
Until recently, the gay and lesbian community was the victim of legal discrimination. Thankfully, that is being slowly stripped away.
Enter the transgender community. We are loathe to say it is the last group of Americans being legally discriminated against for fear there are others we are overlooking.
Simply put, the United States of America is a free country. Americans are almost uniquely alone in the world in our freedoms to live as we choose, worship as we choose and say whatever we choose about whomever we choose.
Those freedoms, as they've been practiced, have certainly made the 2016 presidential primary season interesting, if not comedic theater of the absurd.
The other thing that has been absurd this year is the rush by some people in some states in our great union to impose their beliefs, made possible by our freedoms, to keep others from being free to live their lives as they choose.
The transgender community, under the long-established freedoms in our country, is free to live how they choose, which includes having access to the same public facilities as everyone else.
Those supporting laws trying to regulate who can use what bathrooms are based on age-old irrational fears and stereotypes that have historically and wrongly applied to whatever group has been the object of discrimination. The transgender community is just the latest to be painted with the broad brushes of discrimination.
If it's OK to discriminate against one group, then one day it will be OK to discriminate another and then another and another. Before too long, there will be many of us who aren't free.
The thing about our freedoms is we're only truly free as long as everyone, including those whose behavior some of us think is intolerable, is free to live, speak, think and worship.
It's that simple.