Keeping Men out of the Ladies Room is a Partisan Issue in New Hampshire (Roll Call Included)

Yesterday the New Hampshire House had the opportunity to vote on HB478, an unnecessary piece of legislation that purported to create rights for people who already had them. What it actually did was advance the Democrat-Socialist deconstruction of sexuality by making it illegal to dismiss men from any accommodation on public or private property that previously limited access to biological women.

No, there is no law on the books that specifically prohibits men from these places. That’s more a cultural/anatomy–some would say a common sense–thing. But there is also no law making it illegal to remove them upon request or when their motives are suspect. No one with a penis could sue you out of business over asking them to leave your publicly accessible ladies bathroom.

HB478 changes that. It gives access to any man claiming to feel like a woman making it a crime to ask them to leave. Yesterday the New Hampshire House decided that was not something they wanted to promote.

And giving women and facility owners the right to keep men out of these places, as it turns out, is a very partisan issue.

HB478 came out of committee with a bipartisan recommendation to pass it on the floor of the New Hampshire House. But Republican leadership was convinced that the changes this bill sought were either unnecessary, poorly constructed, or simply not something New Hampshire citizens wanted or needed. They move to table the bill and kill it for the session.

Three-hundred-sixty-six members of the four-hundred seat body voted 187-179 to table HB478. Among those for killing the bill were 186 Republicans and 1 Democrat. Thomas Buco, Carrol County Dist 2 (Conway), an otherwise reliable progressive vote was the lone member on the left that wanted to table this awful piece of legislation.

On the opposite side, there was a slightly less partisan effort to advance HB478 to the State Senate. Seventeen Republicans (one of them was actually voting as a Libertarian) sided with Democrats against tabling the bill.

After the bill had been tabled, there was a vote to remove it from the table and put it before the chamber again. The motion failed by a vote of 168 to 180. Only 8 of the seventeen (non-Democrats) who opposed tabling the bill voted to bring the bill back for consideration. They were joined by five different Republicans for a total of 13 votes to salvage HB478. Of the nine who chose not to support the motion to remove the bill from the table, three decided not to vote on the motion while the other six voted against bringing HB478 back.

Democrats Tom Bruco and Bruce Tatro voted to leave the bill on the table.

The House was, by most accounts, the only place to stop the bathroom bill. Three of the sponsors are Senate Republicans, giving it more than enough support to send it to Governor Sununu, who while good on many issues is not a reliable roadblock to progressive social reengineering or the political pressure that would come with a veto threat.

Sorted Roll Call Results (View Roll Call Results on the General Court Website, Here.)

Roll Call Vote to Table (kill) HB478 – The Transgender Bathroom Bill

Roll Call vote against tabling (save) HB478 – The Transgender Bathroom Bill

Not voting, Excused, or Presiding (House Speaker).