Santa Monica OKs Restroom Law

Feminist attorney Gloria Allred turned out Tuesday night to give the Santa Monica City Council an uninvited lecture on one of the proudly progressive panel’s pet topics--protecting civil rights.

To no avail.

Over her objections, the council unanimously passed a law making it a crime for a person to enter a restroom designated for the opposite sex at a public beach or city park unless there are three people in line.

The loo law was proposed as a means of protecting women from men who have been entering women’s restrooms in parks and at the beach to sell drugs, while codifying a woman’s right to use the men’s room if the women’s queue is too long.

As TV news cameras captured every word, Allred admonished the City Council for taking the “first step down the long, dark road toward eliminating women’s rights” by substituting the “potty police” for the status quo. No existing state law prohibits using bathrooms marked for the opposite sex, though most people stick with their own.

Allred said that although its purpose is noble, the remedy is wrong in that it is based on gender. She suggested stronger enforcement of existing drug laws as an alternative.

Santa Monica City Atty. Robert M. Myers proposed the gender-specific restroom rules two weeks ago, but was conspicuously absent from his place on the dais Tuesday night. An assistant explained the law.

When Allred and the TV film crews left, Myers arrived. Asked later if he was ducking a confrontation with either the fiery attorney or the cameras, Myers declined to answer.

City Councilman Dennis Zane, however, leaped at the chance to confront Allred with a lecture in which he questioned her priorities and suggested that she was out of line to doubt the council’s motives.

Zane said he was “deeply surprised and offended” that she would waste the council’s time with such a peripheral concern when there were other significant matters on the agenda.

“We in the women’s movement resent when the restrictions of women’s rights are called trivial,” Allred replied.

Zane also took a swipe at the media for taking interest in anything with “a scatological reference.”

As for Allred’s appearance, Zane said, “It was a cheap publicity stunt at our expense.” Allred has been to Santa Monica before. She said her last go-round with the city was when she successfully challenged a law that allowed only women to serve on the city’s Commission on the Status of Women.