Letting anybody go to the bathroom they feel like going to will come back to haunt the political class who find in gender ambiguity great virtue to be mined.

Police say two girls in St. Paul, one 5 years old, one 7, have been assaulted recently. A 7-year-old was sexually assaulted in the shadow of the Cathedral, literally. A few days earlier, a 5-year-old was attacked at a school bus stop on the North End of town and police are investigating whether she was also sexually assaulted.

Doesn’t make any difference where you live or work or play.

If these predators are going to strike in broad daylight the legislators who call for open bathrooms better be prepared to tell us where they won’t strike.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that a person exploring their own gender identity is prone to violence. We have no evidence to support such a claim, and reasonable people are not opposed to the open-bathroom concept because they fear that a transgender person is predatory.

It should be opposed because there are bad people who are going to take advantage of the law. Why make it easier for them to claim their next victim?

The two girls attacked in St. Paul are horribly traumatized. Their parents are traumatized. Well, in fact, we are all traumatized and yet there are those among us who can see the wisdom in letting an adult male wander into the bathroom, where your 10-year-old daughter or granddaughter is using the facility.

This is craziness born of the belief that it is somehow discriminatory to deprive people of their emotional needs. No, it isn’t. We all have emotional needs but most of us don’t expect the government to address them.

Those of us who don’t vote for the powerful left or belong to victim groups have to now deal with a loss of civility, the expectation of privacy and the entirely reasonable anxiety that a kid can’t even go to the bathroom without there first being a reconnaissance mission to clear the room, followed by standing guard.

Does not the mother of a seven-year-old girl have any rights? Or the father of an eight-year-old boy?

Common sense will not prevail. It usually doesn’t.

North Carolina, for example, which passed a law requiring people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth, will probably back down and either lose or drop its lawsuit against the Justice Department, which is accusing North Carolina of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which prohibits sex discrimination. That was written in 1964. The current crowd in Washington now inserts the convenient belief that 52 years ago the act included bathroom use.

But because this will backfire and there will be assaults — not brought about by those struggling with gender identity, but brought about by predators — this country will probably spend billions and billions of dollars retrofitting all public bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms to accommodate a statistically insignificant demographic of the population.

And to save any kids from some terrifying incident at a department store or a state fair or a sporting event, we better get to it.

Our own Johnson Sr. High School is building new bathrooms that, as I understand the plans, call for all the bathrooms to be used by anybody, but in individual stalls. That’s just more dough for the put upon taxpayers in St. Paul to deal with, but so long as there is no common sense in the race, it sounds like the only way to go.

Usually the political class marches behind the shield of children. Everything is for the children. I haven’t read anything about children in North Carolina vs. the feds. Critics of North Carolina’s position said the risk of assault is faced by a person who appears to be a woman and identifies as a woman being forced to use the men’s room.

She has the government.

You, with your son and daughter, are on your own.