Revenue out jumps safety in search of March Madness

For college basketball fans, March is a great month, The national championship tournament dubbed “March Madness” begins this week. And yours truly is a Duke grad. Need I say more? The tournament consists of 68 of the best teams in the nation competing head to head in a one and done competition in 13 different cities around the country. Participating cities, colleges, media and businesses make millions of dollars during the three-week, hair-raising competition.

Enter greed and political correctness to rain on the parade.

The NCAA brass have all but decided that after this year no participating host city can be in a state that doesn’t allow men in the ladies rooms and lockers. I say “men” and not “transgender women” because the NCAA will not ask the states to require transgender women to dress like women. Men wishing to enter the ladies rooms need only to “self-identify” as women. A man can enter a ladies locker room dressed like Hulk Hogan as long as he “self-identifies” as a woman. A common-sense compromise of putting a few more gender-neutral restrooms in large public venues is a non-starter for the transgender activists and their supporters. They insist that every public restroom be gender neutral.

Obviously, the risk to women is not so much from the cross-dressers as from the “transgender pretenders” who will doubtless welcome the opportunity to have legal access to the ladies restrooms and locker rooms. But this risk is ignored by the sports elite who have concluded that it is more important to avoid the label of “bigot” than to protect women from increased sexual danger. And sadly, the threat of losing out on the revenue from these lucrative sports events has caused most businesses to become supporters of the 1 percent of the country who identify as transgender and ignore the threat of sexual harm to millions of vulnerable women.

Think I’m exaggerating? The Associated Press article in The Telegraph last week stated that North Carolina had only a few months to pass a law allowing men in the ladies rooms or it could almost certainly kiss goodbye the scheduled 2019 and 2020 ACC tournaments in Charlotte and Greensboro. Every state will soon face this crisis and the momentum has thus far been on the side of profit for state coffers over protection from sexual predators.

This story was originally published March 13, 2017 at 3:07 PM with the headline "Revenue out jumps safety in search of March Madness."