The heavy hand of the state is poised to come down hard on a small group of children who want to play on their school sports teams. Why do our elected legislators propose so many cruel restrictions on the rights and opportunities of transgender children who are a tiny percentage of our population? I think they do it because, at heart, they want to live in a society where minorities are kept segregated and inferior rather than respected and embraced — an undemocratic, white supremacist society. Restricting access to bathrooms and sports teams may seem small matters, but together with other legislative initiatives to curtail health care, ban books, eviscerate school curricula and even to defund public schools, it all adds up to a vicious attack on democratic society and specifically democratic concepts of equality. The late Sen. Paul Wellstone was fond of saying, ”We all do better when we all do better.” In this case, the inverse of that is “when we beat up on our minority children, we all lose together.

Patricia Bass

Concord