According to a report on NPR, almost a dozen states have joined together to file a lawsuit seeking to protect bigotry and privilege against an onslaught of justice and equal rights for minorities.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, says the federal government has “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”

Yes, a “massive social experiment.” Those evil government officials, with their bubbling test tubes and unstable nuclear reactors, rubbing their rubber-gloved hands together and gleefully cackling, “Let’s take a bunch of innocent, harmless people and see what happens if we mind our own business and leave them alone, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!”

I can certainly understand their concern. After all, even if transgendered people are often victims of assault and never, as far as I know, the perpetrators, they are still different from the cis-gendered majority. And different obviously means bad, dangerous, run away, etc. etc.

What about the poor democratic process? Can democracy survive a government that blatantly forbids the persecution of innocent minorities? What if the majority wants to persecute innocent minorities? Ever think about that?

And of course, don’t forget the children. What will they think if they see their own government enacting policies that say you’re not allowed to punish people just for being different. What if they get the idea that you should only punish people when they actually hurt someone, or try to? What kind of justice do you think they’ll learn if we’re only allowed to prosecute the guilty? Do we really want them to think America as the kind of place where you can be free to do and to be whatever you want as long as you’re not harming anyone else?

Eleven states. Millions of dollars, of taxpayers’ money. Just to try and persecute people who are doing no one any harm. Just to reinforce the idea that anybody who is different is “dangerous” and needs to be stopped. Children are going hungry, banks are ripping people off, corporations are reducing vast swaths of the population to poverty, bridges are collapsing out from underneath the cars that are driving on them, but this is the issue that has Republicans so upset that they’re rushing through midnight legislation to address—or rather, create—the problem.

No wonder Trump is doing so well. America is full of dicks.