Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich last
week cheered repeal of an LGBT-inclusive anti-bias law in Houston.
Roughly 60 percent of Houston voters
voted against the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). The
campaign to repeal the law largely centered on the false claim that
it allowed sexual predators to enter women's bathrooms.
“I was delighted to see that the
people of Houston voted for common sense,” Gingrich, a Republican,
said during an appearance on the Houston-area program The Sam
Malone Show to promote his new novel, Duplicity.
He went on to say that he hopes the
defeat will push Congress to reject a Department of Education finding
that Title IX protects transgender students.
“In fact, I hope the Congress is
going to pick up on Houston and do the same thing to a new Department
of Education regulation that says that boys who want to can declare
themselves transgender and use girls’ bathrooms in high school,
which I think is just one of those things where you shake your head
and you wonder how really lacking in understanding of human nature
the bureaucrats are who write this stuff,” Gingrich
said.
Gingrich went on to criticize the Obama
administration's support for transgender rights, comparing it to the
administration's policy in Syria.
“They are as far out of touch with
reality in foreign policy as they are in these cultural values they
keep trying to impose on the rest of us,” he said.