It’s 6 a.m. I drank a cup of strong black coffee, two slices of toast and a cigarette. There’s the pit-pat of feet and a knock-knock on the bathroom door. “Snookums, are you ready?” She always calls me Snookums in the pre-dawn darkness.

“I’m just finishing a chapter of War and Peace!” I reply. “It’s getting to the war part.”

You hear tapping your feet and rummaging around in the kitchen for a bucket.

These are the complications of modern life and interior installation. You sit there and think that you really need him and her. But we’re practical Iowans. I’ve heard of outhouses, chamber pots and the like. I’ve heard some of them are two-hole punches, so the bride and groom never have to be without each other.

We accepted a unisex bathroom in the office. Men and their goal are generally the problem, even when they are sober. It seems to be working despite us.

There were times, I must confess, when Casey’s men’s room was occupied for too long and I really don’t want to wade in those wakes, I used the powder room. It might be illegal. There’s probably security footage of me with my hat over my face, picking open the door with the clothing tag on it.

It’s a time-honoured state tradition to pee on gravel roads while the red-winged blackbirds scurry across the cornfields. You are free with your back to the wind. When we walked beans, boys and girls did their business at the back of the line and no one thought anything of it.

Which is why it’s hard to understand why anyone cares who pees where. Lawmakers passed a bill last week that says you need to freshen up a little in your birth-gender bathroom.

“I’m not interested in waiting for the child to be raped in a restroom by someone pretending to be transgender,” said Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison.

Wow. It’s hard to know where to start. So back to some basics: What’s fundamentally wrong with unisex bathrooms? You have them in other places. You come out of the dressing room and a woman is washing her hands. Good morning was she a woman Was she transgender? She has clean hands, and that’s what matters.

Rural Mexican bars have a toilet with a short wall so you can watch during a break to make sure no one is cheating by the pool. It works out. Nobody gets a cheap thrill.

There is no evidence that unisex bathrooms lead to increased sexual abuse by anyone. There could be a problem in Denison with men posing as women raping children in bathrooms, but it is underreported.

What it comes down to is if you have to go, you have to go, it doesn’t matter what your perspective is. Whichever door is unlocked, select it. Put the lid back on when you’re done, gentlemen. And rinse it.

You’d think that with our bucolic appreciation for animals, we’d have a better understanding of digestion and such. She has to go, he has to go, and so does she, and neither of us should try to get in each other’s way.

Given our recent history with outbuildings and our contemporary experience with Port-A-Pots, this seems like a practical Midwest approach.

Morality must penetrate even our most basic functions. The ministers can tell you who you are, who to love, and even where to go.

The bathroom bill is silly and absurd, which is why Gov. Kim Reynolds is set to sign it.

I’d like to think it was born more out of ignorance than cruelty. I would like to think the same about a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Whatever the intention, the effect is the same: it’s cruel.

Patients of Storm Lake Dr. Sabrina Martinez say sex therapy saved her life. Martinez says she fears a ban on medical care will lead to suicides.

People take an idea dreamed up by a sexually frustrated old moral theologian and take it to the extreme. If you could step back and look at the bathroom bill and then realize how hilariously tragic it is, you can get a little more perspective.

We were raised homophobic. I learned a lot in the process. You know, you find out that your old college buddy from Twin Cities, hockey star who moved to San Francisco, turned out to be gay. He peed next to me! Or your old aunt who lived out there and rarely went back to Iowa. One of my closest friends had a son who got into serious trouble in high school. When he came out as transgender, the problems went away — she just got her master’s degree in public health and lives in New York, where she’s allowed to use the bathroom.

Rep. Megan Jones, R-Sioux Rapids, admits she still has a lot to learn. Humility is a rarity these days, especially in politics. She was among the five Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted against ignorance and overreaction. she has children She can understand how difficult it is for some people to be discriminated against without any reason, through no fault of their own.

It’s your problem if you can’t stand it when someone walks into a locker room in a soccer uniform and comes out in a prom dress. Let it be. As a result of this legislation, if someone dies who could be saved through medical care, it is everyone’s responsibility. It goes beyond the absurd into the macabre.

Art Cullen is editor and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and is the author of Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.

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John Baker

Amid the uncertainty and disruption of police services in the South San Francisco Unified School District, school officials have signed a new agreement with the city and its law enforcement agency detailing how and when officers should be on campus.

“I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s leaps and bounds beyond what we had before,” said Trustee John Baker during a special meeting of the SSFUSD Board of Trustees Tuesday.

For more than a year now, county and city officials have been drafting a letter of intent to clearly define when or not to involve school liaison officers in disciplinary matters and student programming.

Failing to come to an agreement before the new school year, the SSFUSD trustees decided to suspend the use of SLOs on school grounds this summer until a formal letter of intent could be adopted by both parties.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Superintendent Dr. Shawnterra Moore said the district has had some issues since suspending the use of SLOs on campus. Without a letter of intent, teachers and administrators were “rightly” reluctant to contact the police.

“I think it has created some confusion and challenges across the board because people need clarity,” said Moore, noting that neighbors have also complained about increasing traffic problems.

Dr. Ryan Sebers, director of the student union, said teachers and school administrators had hesitated to call the police even in the cases clearly outlined in the education law. Although the board has suspended the SLO program on campus, school staff are still required and instructed to follow the disciplinary protocol set out in the code, Moore said.

Instead, Sebers said he and other district administrators had received calls asking school staff for instructions on whether a call to law enforcement was acceptable. The calls and hesitation have resulted in delayed responses to issues that require quicker responses, he said.

“While everyone could have different definitions of security and so on, I think it’s pretty clear that the administrators are very interested in the physical and emotional safety of the students and the school staff,” Sebers said. “So we have the question of where administrators would normally exercise their instincts.”

Given that the county and police have had some kind of relationship for decades, vice president of the board Mina Richardson said the community has gotten used to the program and needs time to adjust to the changing partnership.

“We have had the police force in our district for over 40 years. That’s a generation, ”said Richardson. “If we resign, these programs will continue, they will continue.”

Moore said responsiveness and communication between the two agencies are also tense, making district officials wonder if they’ll get a response when services are requested.

In response to the concerns, Baker accused the police department of “metaphorical baton swinging” by senior management. He suggested that the department hadn’t responded quickly to issues like traffic assistance as the role was previously the responsibility of an SLO, adding, “It was very worrying”.

As the trustee who recommended most of the changes to the MOU, he doubled three deal-breaker issues that he needed to see in the document before he could give his approval to the agreement.

To earn his support, agencies must agree to review the document annually without an automatic renewal process, share data demonstrating the effectiveness of the program, and agree that officials would not enter campus for occasional disciplinary action or without an adequate complaint process.

The board supported Baker’s key inquiries but also agreed to a request from Trustee Patricia Murray to remove granular language from the document. Instead, the Board agreed that details regarding the handling of disciplinary matters or officials should be included in an internal manual.

“It’s not the job of the board of directors or the city council to micromanage this process,” said Murray.

Board chairman Daina Lujan and trustee Chialin Hsieh also noted that the district catered for students from kindergarten through adulthood, whose experiences are likely to vary widely, and recommended that data collected across campus be collected in a tier-appropriate manner.

Additional language will be included in the document to further elaborate on protections for undocumented students who may interact with SLOs, as requested by Student Trustee Samantha Avila Gomez.

Murray also suggested the district resume the program after receiving complaints from some parishioners who said they felt unsafe without the officials on campus.

Police presence on campus has been greatly reduced, but officers have been recruited from counselors or local child protection services. Moore said she could count on one hand the number of times that had happened that school year.

Murray’s motion did not find widespread support on the board and left the suspension of the SLO program in effect until both parties could agree on a letter of intent. The latest draft contract will now be presented to the city for review after Moore and the lawyer signed the document.

If the city does not approve of the updated version of the MOU, the revisions will again be sent back to the board for further consideration.

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