An Answer to Loo Lines : Restrooms: A new law would allow women to use men’s rooms if the line at the ladies’ is more than three deep. Men could use the women’s room if the situation is reversed.

How do you spell relief for women waiting in a queue to use the loo?

M-E-N.

Under a new law preliminarily approved this week by the Santa Monica City Council for the city’s public restrooms, women will be entitled to use the men’s room if the line at the ladies’ is more than three deep. If the situation is reversed--although it virtually never is--men can use the women’s restroom.

Otherwise, women are women and men are men in Santa Monica.

And when the law goes into effect 30 days after a second vote by the council, straying into the wrong public restroom when there isn’t a line will be more than a crime against nature. It will be a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Why criminalize bathroom etiquette that most people learn by the age of 8?

Santa Monica City Atty. Robert M. Myers, who proposed the restroom ordinance, said the law is needed because of crime reports crossing his desk that indicate men are invading the women’s room to deal drugs. Myers said women have written to the city complaining of being frightened when confronted by men upon entering a public restroom.

No current state or local law makes it a crime for an adult to use restrooms earmarked for the opposite sex, Myers said. A statute banning loitering in the restroom is insufficient because it generally requires proving lewd intent.

The new Santa Monica law, which was passed after midnight with none of the council’s usual protracted discussion, puts the city on record as favoring the separate, but equal approach to restrooms. Usually, “there’s no compelling justification for men to be in the women’s room or for women to be in the men’s room,” Myers said.

By making an exception in cases where women are faced with a serpentine line outside the restroom, Myers said he was avoiding a situation that occurred recently in Texas. A woman there was stymied by a long line at her gender-specific restroom and was prosecuted for relieving herself in the men’s room.

Otherwise, however, residents and visitors to Santa Monica had better pay attention. “Everybody be careful which room you walk in now,” warned Santa Monica Mayor Judy Abdo.