Vox Sentences: Obama says if you like your bathroom, you can keep it

Obama's bathroom ordinance; a big step toward extinction of the death penalty; another round of much-hyped, dubiously legal immigration raids.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Begun, these bathroom wars have

Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

• The Department of Justice released guidance to public schools Thursday, instructing them to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms (and other facilities) of their choice.

  [NYT / Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matt Apuzzo]

• It isn't a new policy per se — it's consistent with the Obama administration's interpretation of the federal Civil Rights Act as outlawing discrimination based on gender identity.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• This is the basis of the lawsuit between the federal government and North Carolina over the state's "bathroom law"; if the federal courts affirm the White House's interpretation, it would logically also apply to Title IX protections banning sex discrimination in public education.

• According to the guidance, schools should abide by a report from a parent or legal guardian to determine which bathroom students can use. That restricts schools from requiring students to medically transition, but it worries some trans rights activists, who point out that parents aren't always willing to champion their children.

  [HelloGiggles / Sammy Nickalls]

• The backlash against bathroom restrictions is real. Even the European Union has weighed in on laws like North Carolina's, saying they violate European standards of human rights.

  [Foreign Policy / David Francis]

• On some level, affirming trans students' bathroom access is symbolic. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes, there are rarely barriers to people using the bathroom of their preferred gender to begin with.

  [The Week / Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry]

• The problem is when, as in North Carolina, the fear of "men" (trans women) using women's bathrooms leads to real impediments to the lives of real trans people.

  [Vox / Lily Carollo]

The era of pharmaceutical executions is over

Virginia Department of Corrections via Getty Images

• Pfizer announced new guidelines Friday that will prevent its pharmaceuticals from being used in lethal injections.

  [NYT / Erik Eckholm]

• Because Pfizer was the last pharmaceutical company willingly providing drugs for that use, the new guidelines will effectively end the sale of lethal injection drugs on the open market.

• Anti–death penalty advocates have been fighting for years for this moment, by redirecting their efforts away from direct government death penalty bans and toward pharmaceutical companies to encourage sales restrictions.

  [New Statesman / Clare Algar]

• The ensuing drug shortage has led some states to institute a death penalty moratorium. But others have resorted to using experimental cocktails in executions (a practice narrowly upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2015).

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Advocates' hope is that if it becomes impossible to implement the death penalty in a way the Supreme Court (specifically Justice Kennedy) considers "humane," it might lead the Court to ban it outright.

  [Slate / Robert J. Smith]

• But the tactic has created a backlash among conservatives. They feel that (in the words of Justice Alito) activists have been engaging in "guerrilla warfare" to prevent states from carrying out duly enacted laws.

  [Huffington Post / Kim Bellware]

Taking up the family raid

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

• The Obama administration plans to conduct a month-long series of immigration raids in May and June, targeting Central American families who have come into the country in recent years and been ordered deported.

  [Reuters / Julia Edwards]

• If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is — the administration made a similar announcement around Christmas, and started up the raids in early January.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• But they stalled out quickly, when advocates and Democrats attacked the raids, and judges blocked the government from deporting many of the immigrants they'd arrested — saying they hadn't received an opportunity to argue they'd be in danger in their home country.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The administration's reasoning is pretty clear. There's been another uptick in Central American families crossing into the US to seek asylum, and the administration believes it needs to show that crossing "illegally" won't be tolerated. (It's not illegal to cross borders without papers to seek asylum, though some immigrants then don't follow through.)

  [Washington Times / Stephen Dinan]

• But the opposition is just as steady now as it was in January. Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as Democratic members of Congress, have condemned the plan.

  [Mic / Zak Cheney-Rice]

• And the legal obstacles haven't been surmounted either — the Inter-American Human Rights Commission took the highly unusual step this week of telling the US to stop the deportation of a mother and her daughter, finding they'd be unsafe in El Salvador.

  [The Guardian / Renee Feltz]

• It's helpful of the administration to remind Americans that large-scale deportations of immigrants are a bipartisan creation.

  [Fusion / Tim Rogers]

MISCELLANEOUS

Harold O'Neal's home movies show something rarely filmed: closeted gay life in the 1940s and '50s. [New Yorker / Alastair Gee]

• Ever wonder where the bizarre names of production companies at the end of TV episodes come from? Here, showrunners from David Simon to Tina Fey explain.

  [Hollywood Reporter / Lesley Goldberg]

• Hideously ugly websites are officially back in style. Get your Hamster Dance embedded GIF ready.

  [Washington Post / Katherine Arcement]

• Donald Trump is much further behind in telephone polls than online polls. That suggests that some Trump supporters aren't willing to fess up to actual people — but will tell the truth to a computer.

  [NYT / Thomas Edsall]

• One person's extremely ambitious attempt to quantify her crying.

  [Robin Weis]

VERBATIM

"Fame is an agreement to be loved by strangers in exchange for being drafted into a narrative someone else controls." [New Republic / Elspeth Reeve]

• "The oldest known person in the world has died in New York aged 116 … Her favourite luxury was buying high-end lace lingerie, her family said. She reportedly once told nurses during a medical check-up: 'You can never get too old to wear fancy stuff.'"

  [BBC]

• "The problem with Oracle v. Google is that everyone actually affected by the case knows what an API is, but the whole affair is being decided by people who don’t, from the normals in the jury box to the normals at the Supreme Court."

  [Vice / Sarah Jeong]

• "The Jockey Club, which keeps the stallion registry, insists that thoroughbreds, unlike other breeds of horses, conceive their offspring the old-fashioned way. So artificial insemination is prohibited, and what has been done naturally in the wild by horses forever becomes a highly choreographed and brief — 15 seconds — encounter. It is nevertheless potentially worth tens of millions of dollars."

  [NYT / Joe Drape]

• "NeverTrump is a meaningless slogan unless one is prepared to say ThisOnceHillary."

  [New Yorker / Adam Gopnik]

WATCH THIS

Why alcohol doesn't come with nutrition facts [YouTube / Marina Gvozdeva, Joseph Stromberg, Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, and Joss Fong]

Vox / Marina Gvozdeva, Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Joss Fong