The story this week that a San Francisco Christian group is suing the city over the installation of an outdoor urinal likely had you scratching your head. “Why would a city allow people to just pee in the open?” you likely were asking yourself. The answer is simple: We now live in an age of over-accommodation.
The park in question has bathroom facilities in it. And the city is building a dozen more for people to use–so there is no need for people to pee in public. But some of the people that hang out there plain refuse to use the indoor facilities. Maybe they feel they are somehow helping the environment by not using a flushing toilet or urinal. Maybe they feel a “greater connection to nature” by answering the call of nature somewhere that isn’t surrounded by concrete and steel. Maybe they get a perverse kick out of performing a bodily function while other people are watching them. But most likely, they pee in public because they just want to pee in public.
Public urination is such a problem in San Francisco that the police department has basically given up on handing out citations for the behavior. That led to the application of “urine resistant paint” to many buildings where public pee-er’s liked to do their dirty work. The paint would actually make the urine spray back at the urinator–instead of down the wall. But apparently that didn’t do much to deter peeing in those spots.
So what do the “progressive thinkers” of San Fran decide to do to combat public urination? They just accommodate those who refuse to comply with social mores and give them a public urinal. Just like they accommodate intravenous drug users with free needles, middle school students who want to have sex with free condoms and abortions without parental consent and the refusal to turn over people in the country illegally to Immigration officials for deportation as required by Federal law.
The response from the San Francisco Parks Director perhaps summed up the situation perfectly when he said that with the park’s popularity with topless women and its annual “Hunky Jesus” contest, the outdoor urinal was the “last thing” he expected a Christian group to sue about. Just a word of advice the next time you visit the City By the Bay: Don’t step in any of the puddles.
