About ten years ago Regina and I were going through a stretch of pretty rough road together, and all the hidden fault lines in our marriage were exposed. My best friend who had been one of the priests on the altar at our wedding heard my confession one day and said, “Gerry, for your penance, I’m going to ask you to fast for Regina.”

I didn’t immediately appreciate that the fasting was as much for my benefit as it was for hers, but I learned something about authentic masculinity from that penance. I learned a whole new depth of what men are called to do for their wives, for their children.

We are called to be like Jesus, emptying ourselves for them, sacrificing, and even laying down our lives for them if necessary.

In light of that, we Catholic men, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and all other men, find ourselves in a nation where a politically powerful minority, the LGBT community, has declared war on our women and our daughters. Under the guise of appeasing a few seriously deluded men playing dress-up in women’s clothes, they are pressing for laws around the nation that open access to any restroom by any person claiming to identify with the sex of the persons for whom that restroom was built, regardless of one’s biological sex.

Here in New York City the madness has peaked. From CBS news:

Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order on Monday that guarantees people access to single-sex facilities consistent with their gender identity at city facilities, including offices, pools and recreation centers, without the need to show identification or any other proof of gender. The move comes amid a continuing national debate over anti-discrimination laws. “Access to bathrooms and other single-sex facilities is a fundamental human right that should not be restricted or denied to any individual,” de Blasio said. “Every New Yorker should feel safe in our city — and this starts with our city’s buildings.”

A more accurate translation would be that every transgender should feel safe, according to our mayor. Certainly our women and daughters don’t factor in. New York City has several public pools with large, open-space locker rooms for changing. What do women do with their daughters when a man strips off his bathing suit and reveals his biological difference?

My daughters have never seen male anatomy, but if they were to work at one of those pools as lifeguards they would most certainly be exposed to men (most of whom are not transgender but your garden variety perverts) who may now legally walk right through the door, and flash women with no questions asked, and no laws broken. In any other venue, said male would be arrested and charged with a variety of crimes, including sex crimes against children. But thanks to Mayor deBlasio, all that is gone in New York City facilities.

Has anyone heard the men of New York howl in rage, protesting the Mayor? Me neither, and I live here.

While the LGBT gang and their accomplices on the left resculpt the American landscape, heterosexuals and people of faith who disagree with them are brushed aside like cobwebs.

Bakers and wedding photographers have been financially ruined, others have saved their livelihoods by attending court-ordered sensitivity training. And now women and girls need to just shut up and sit down. Fundamental human rights are dictated by a tiny minority who shake down politicians and big business by threats of shaming in order to get their support.

The real shame, though, is the tepid response to these bathroom laws by men and women, but most especially by men, and that includes the clergy. It is beyond shameful. It is a disgrace. And so it is with the Catholic bloggers and writers who have bigger fish to fry than to address the enslavement upon us by a vicious and twisted minority and their minions.

Target, America’s second-largest retailer announced last week that they are enacting a bathroom policy akin to New York City’s. PayPal decided to punish North Carolina by withdrawing employment opportunity there when the state passed legislation preserving the dignity of all persons by preserving the longstanding code of decency regarding restroom use.

Here are two perfect opportunities for Americans to boycott and drive these businesses to their knees, sending a clear signal that we will not tolerate our women and children being treated in this way. To date, there is an internet boycott petition against Target with a scant 650,000 signers, in a nation of 320,000,000.

Notable Catholic authors have been silent, and some even asking what the big deal is, even in the face of a growing list of cases around the country of men posing in women’s clothes entering ladies’ rooms and filming them while masturbating in adjacent stalls.

Silence from our married men, our clergy, and our Catholic commentators has mostly been the response.

At dinner one night with Reggie LittleJohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, I asked her why the Chinese government feels the need to regulate birth, even in the face of a worker shortage that is hurting their economy. She replied that if the government can control your body, your marital relations, your dignity, it can control any part of your life that it wants to.

THIS is what the big deal is regarding the bathroom laws. The government in several states has demonstrated that it can control freedom of religious practice by penalizing the exercise of conscience regarding participation in gay weddings. The government has demonstrated that it can mandate the Catholic Church to purchase insurance policies that pay for contraceptives and abortion. Now the government in several states is demonstrating that the modesty and decency of men and women, boys and girls, means nothing and can be legislated away into oblivion.

The gay agenda is being used as the Trojan Horse to impose a totalitarianism that flies in the face of our Constitution, and our emasculated men barely raise a croak in response.

I learned a great deal from fasting for Regina. If I could fast for her, I could fight for her, for us, for our young family. It would be a great thing if all men fasted for their women and children. A lesser effort would be to boycott those businesses who assault their women’s dignity. If American men can’t even inconvenience themselves that much, then we deserve to be enslaved.

If we cannot fight for our mothers, our wives, our sweethearts, our daughters, then there is nothing left worth fighting for.

They are the crowning glory of God’s creation.